Nancy Spero Catalog

Nancy Spero: Cri du Coeur

Nancy Spero: Cri du Coeur May 18 – October 13, 2013

Organized by Susan L. Stoops

With an essay by Lauren O’Neill-Butler

WOr C e S ter A rt Mu Se u M / worcesterart.org Worcester, Massachusetts

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Nancy Spero: Cri du Coeur May 18 – October 13, 2013 this exhibition and publication are generously supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund. © 2013 Worcester Art Museum 55 Salisbury Street / Worcester, Massachusetts 01609 / www.worcesterart.org All rights reserved.

No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.

Photography by Stephen Briggs Design by Kim Noonan Printed by Kirkwood Printing Font: Arial ISBN 978-0-936042-04-6 Cri du Coeur, 2005 Hand-printing on paper mounted on polyester poplin 25 x 1,925.4 inches (83.2 x 4893.1 cm) All art by Nancy Spero is © estate of Nancy Spero Licensed by VAGA, New York / Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

FOr eWOr D Mourning and remembrance are eminently private. Yet the expression of both have an important public aspect, drawing from established forms of grieving. Nancy Spero’s Cri du Coeur — the outcry of the heart — is a very extreme case of this dichotomy, as she stages her expression of grief in the arena of art. By doing so, she shapes the expression as much as it is shaped and she allows the visitor both empathy and aesthetic distance.

In the context of the Worcester Art Museum’s encyclopedic collection Nancy Spero’s installation is an especially enriching experience and one that I imagine the artist would have enjoyed given her deep relationship to imagery from various histories, cultures, and narratives. the death cult, for example, is one of the pillars of civilization which is reflected in many museums’ collections, from tomb treasures to portraits that outlive our here and now existence. Spero’s appropriated egyptian imagery in Cri du Coeur, female mourners from the tomb of ramose of thebes, renews attention to the Museum’s small but powerful holdings of egyptian art, among them a sculpture of Hetepheres who once stood in the Giza tomb of her son and a now-anonymous funerary portrait of a young man from 2nd-century roman egypt.

the act of mourning is an important sub-subject, also reflected in the Museum’s collection. It is most prevalent in the range of images in Christian art depicting the mourning of Christ. We can experience emotional counterparts to the group of mourners in Spero’s work in a range of human reactions represented, from the wailing angels and anguished attendants in a crucifixion scene depicted in 13th-century frescoes from Spoleto, to the restrained grief of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene as painted by a 16th-century Flemish artist in the school of Gerard David.

Planned to coincide with Spero’s Cri du Coeur is a special presentation of three 3rd-century BCe female statues known as orantes, which were discovered in ancient underground tombs in and around the city of Canosa.

Although formed in terracotta, these figures’ raised arms and hand gestures resonate with Spero’s hand-printed females as they, too, were created with the role of mourning and praying for the dead.

this exhibition was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund. We are appreciative that curator of contemporary art, Susan Stoops, organized this moving installation for the Worcester Art Museum and we hope it enriches the experiences of all those who visit over the coming months.

Matthias Waschek Director

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C R I D U C OEU R : A C ON tIN u u M OF L OSS AN D M eM OrY Susan L. Stoops

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During her six-decade career, Nancy Spero (1926-2009) employed a vast and consistent vocabulary of images collected from various histories and mythologies. Since 1976, she focused exclusively on those depicting women’s experiences, often their resilience in the face of oppression and violence. Spero’s innovative graphic compositions and commitment to social issues established her as one of the leading feminist and postmodern voices. Completed in 2005, Cri du Coeur (Cry of the Heart) is Spero’s last monumental work on paper. this work has been described as “a passionate cry against war, death, and destruction that is both political and personal, social and metaphysical.”1

the recurring figures in Spero’s hand-printed frieze — a group of ancient egyptian female mourners whose origins are a painted scene in the tomb of ramose of thebes (14th century BCe) — gesture in a universal body language of grief and supplication. their contemporary poignancy lies in their embodiment of Spero’s personal mourning for the 2004 death of her

husband, artist and activist Leon Golub, as well as in their riveting correlation to the continuous presence of images of anonymous mourners around the globe enduring losses of their own — news images from Afghanistan, Iraq, and post-Katrina New Orleans that initially informed Spero during the years she was making Cri du Coeur and, sadly, those still occurring and imprinting themselves daily in our hearts and minds.

Installed around the gallery at floor level, Cri du Coeur is intended to be experienced from right to left (in the manner egyptian scripts are read). through dramatic shifts in color, tone, and density, the relentless nature of the frieze and its legibility become increasingly complex and somber. Viewing necessitates walking slowly along the gallery walls, bending down in order to decipher details, accumulating episodic experiences into a semblance of the whole, and over time realizing we have become participants in this procession, each of us activating Spero’s continuum of loss and memory.

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FIGu r eS IN tIM e Spero’s interest in ancient forms of art dates back to her days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1940s. the collections and special exhibitions at the Art Institute provided a rich source of inspiration as did the ethnographic and archaeological collections at the nearby Field Museum, of which she said, “I was most impressed with these objects from primitive and ancient cultures. I was fascinated with the frontality of these works and the power they had on the viewer.”2 Critical to the development of Spero’s mature work was the non-perspectival space she discovered in medieval textile art and egyptian painting.3 In 2007, Spero recalled seeing museum preparators installing panels of the Apocalypse of Angers, a 14th-century French tapestry for a 1948 exhibition at the Art Institute and realized in retrospect how its monumental scale, multipanel format, non-hierarchical narrative, and use of repetition had been a central influence in her work.4 In egyptian art, especially the painted papyrus Book of the Dead (ca. 1250 BCe), Spero found precedents for compositions of repeated figurative elements with precisely defined gestures and poses.5

Over the years, Spero assembled her own “alphabet of hieroglyphs” — a lexicon of over 450 images culled from art books, magazines, and contemporary media which included numerous examples of egyptian figures she

adapted, re-used, and re-contextualized (goddesses, acrobats, musicians, scarabs). the mourning women from the tomb of ramose in Cri du Coeur appeared in several earlier works including the multi-panel The Goddess Nut (1989), Mourning Women (1992), Invocation (1995), as well as the installation Raise/Time (1995) at Harvard university’s Sackler Museum, Timeless (September 11, 2002), a special project for the Viennese newspaper Der Standard published on the first anniversary of the World trade Center attacks, and the banner project Hymn to Isis (2003), installed in the egyptian galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

With The First Language (1981), Spero embarked on a path that would no longer be characterized by the incorporation of found text but would focus on the figure and what she described as “using the language of gesture and motion.”6 She explained, “the image superseded the text. the language of the body, of the female body, its gesture and movement as in dance, or in movement to music, or ritual, took precedence.”7 However, as Spero biographer Christopher Lyon observes, her “ figures are not hieroglyphs in the sense of characters that have an unvarying meaning, but linguistic signs, which mediate between the artist and the viewer and alter their meanings depending on how they are used.”8

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M Ou r N IN G WOM eN

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Spero began Cri du Coeur in 2004, prior to the death of her husband9 and in the midst of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. throughout her career, Spero engaged her studio practice to respond to the horrors and violence wrought by the American military, most notably those in Vietnam, which became the subject of her War Series: Bombs and Helicopters in the late 1960s. Over the year of working on Cri du Coeur, the content of the piece naturally accrued the mourning and sense of loss she was experiencing personally.10 “Cri du Coeur (2005) was the first piece I did after Leon died. A cri du coeur is a cry of the heart, something of intense emotion, almost like praying or pleading with heaven. Since it was about mourning, I wanted to emphasize a kind of prayerful looking up — looking up to heaven or God knows what — looking down — in a gallery with very tall rooms. I decided that it should be on the ground, like a funeral procession.” 11

In their original tomb context, the female mourners in Cri du Coeur who are dressed in diaphanous breast-baring robes, are part of a larger funerary procession which also includes men carrying goods (boxes, jars, flowers, furniture) being transported to the tomb. the majority of

the females face toward the left; nearly all raise their arms upwards toward a sarcophagus located in the upper register of the painting. One figure seems to be supported by the arms of her attendant while another is distinguished as a much smaller (younger) and unclothed figure. In the tomb, this community of females lamenting the death of the scribe ramose embodies a connection between earthly life and the afterlife.

Spero’s engagement with the past is consistently fluid and open-ended — like memory itself — and is consciously brought into the present. In Spero’s reconfiguration we encounter only the group of females, who now point up toward the empty space of the gallery walls — a shared space between them and us, between the past and present. Working with static imagery, Spero achieves a representation of movement in time and space. Although Cri du Coeur was composed as a continuous frieze, it is not a vision of seamlessness.12 the procession of figures moves primarily from right to left. However, Spero occasionally reverses the direction of one or more figures complicating the rhythms, rupturing the linearity of history, and confounding any predictability.

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“…my work is premised on adding, subtracting, tearing, fragmenting images and language. Since the early 1980s I’ve been spanning walls, ceilings, floors; images have sprouted, danced in controlled lineages, in unruly sporadic, episodic sequence; a kind of collaged spacing.” 13 Between 1976 and 1981, Spero created three monumental works — Torture of Women (1976) with a length of 125 feet, Notes in Time (1979) with a length of 210 feet, and The First Language (1981) with a length of 190 feet — and codified what would become one of her signature formats, the long frieze-like compositions.

Creating expansive linear panels from composites of relatively small, uniform sheets of paper, Spero achieved a structure with the physical presence and overt ambition that rivaled the large-scale canvases of her contemporaries (including her husband). During the last decades of her career, Spero became increasingly invested in the architectural setting of her work and created numerous temporary, site-specific wall installations.

unlike their location in the tomb which is high on the wall, the frieze of mourning figures in Cri du Coeur is located at floor-level, as if to emphasize their connection in place and time with us and to bear witness to the gravity of the physical body.14 the emotive dimensions of the gallery are activated further by the vastness of the empty wall space — the very absence of imagery translated as an expression of loss on an architectural scale.15 the effect can be disorienting, necessitating a self-conscious negotiation in terms of one’s relation to the imagery and the space — where to begin, what to focus on, how to feel. It soon becomes apparent that the performative nature of Cri du Coeur is not limited to the procession of egyptian mourners but begs our physical engagement to experience the work fully.

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A Gr APH IC L AN Gu AGe

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the hand-printed nature of Spero’s process is central to the content and appearance of the finished work. Her long-time studio assistant, Samm Kunce, summarized the process as follows.16 It began with an image taken from a magazine, book, or Spero’s own drawing which was then copied as a Photostat. In the studio, they would modify the Photostat — drawing or painting on it, making it more graphic, deleting or emphasizing certain details — basically, making it Spero’s. then the image was photographically transferred by a company in New Jersey to a zinc plate which Spero could use over and over again. In the studio, the plate was inked by hand with a variety of tools; a sheet of paper was laid face down and pressure was applied, again, by hand (often with a wooden spoon). Sometimes, Spero would reuse a plate for a background because of its textures (rather than the image) over which other images were printed.

“I could put the plates through a press for uniform results, but I have always refused to do so, preferring variant and variable hand printing so that no two images derived from this process are alike.” 17 true to Spero’s subject — human experience — her preferred medium and process reveal a delicate balance between fragility and endurance, control and unpredictability. “Depending on the pressure of the hand, the angling of the plate, the amount of ink rolled onto the raised image…I can repeat and differentiate an image, emphasizing the staccato of the mechanical, varying hand printing directly on the paper itself with collaged hand printed images.”18

With her extreme use of repetition in Cri du Coeur, Spero intentionally suggests a continuum of anonymous yet expressive bodies. Strategic formal distinctions between clusters of figures — some are treated in silhouette, others are defined by the contours of the papers’ edges — and dramatic color shifts throughout the installation maintain an overall sense of subtle fragmentation. this ultimately translates not as

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sameness but as “diversity”19 among related members of a clan or community. Spero dignifies the individual voice within the polyphony of collective experience. the graphic legibility and brightly colored palette which characterize the beginning panels mutate into watery blues and earthen browns, all the while gradually consuming and obscuring the figures. An extraordinary emotive range is achieved by radically different applications and densities of ink and an erratic overlaying of printed figures often resulting in a kind of congestion or frenzied activity.

Occasionally there are figures collaged onto the printed ground; sometimes the bodies are transparent, ghosts with no mass. At times, figures are not anchored to the bottom edge of the page, their ungrounded state echoing the disoriented nature of grieving. elsewhere, an isolated female or an eye with tear drops disassociated from any face is a poignant reminder of the solitary griever amidst the community of mourners.

Cri du Coeur culminates in an underworld of darkness, where white residue conjures fleeting and fragmentary images of the human body — marks left by a grieving Spero in 2005 that resonate with the traces of humanity preserved on tomb walls and prehistoric caves. Amidst this wordless and seemingly silent spectacle, one begins to hear the “cry of the heart” emanating from Spero’s chorus of women.

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N OteS 1. David Levi Strauss and Jon Bird, “Nancy Spero: the Drawing Center & Galerie Lelong,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2005-January 2006.

2. Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2010), 19.

3. Ibid., 189.

4. Ibid., 19.

5. Ibid., 192.

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6. Nancy Spero, in “Woman as Protagonist. Interview with Jeanne Siegel, 1987,” Codex Spero/ Nancy Spero – Selected Writings and Interviews 1950-2008, ed. roel Arkesteijn (Amsterdam: roma Publications, 2008), 99.

7. Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work, 238.

8. Ibid., 238.

9. Samm Kunce, studio assistant to Spero for nearly two decades, in conversation with the author on January 31, 2013.

10. Kunce in conversation with the author, January 31, 2013.

11. Nancy Spero, in “Cri du Coeur. excerpt from an Interview with Susan Sollins, 2007,” Codex Spero, 164.

12. Spero decided to have the hand-printed sheets of paper in Cri du Coeur mounted and framed as 18 separate panels for conservation and exhibition purposes. Spero had initially intended for the work to be shown just once: “When the show is over, it’s gone. It’s finished. It only remains in the memory or in photographs. When you call, “Strike!” you stop and the installation’s finished. there are no more showings of it, and it’s gone.”

Nancy Spero, in “Cri du Coeur. excerpt from an Interview with Susan Sollins, 2007,” Codex Spero, 164.

13. Nancy Spero, in “Nancy Spero and Leon Golub in Conversation with John roberts, 2000,” Codex Spero, 122.

14. this placement of Cri du Coeur deviates from many of Spero’s siteresponsive works which more often were located at the upper reaches of a wall or room. For example, in 1991 Spero sited Vulture Goddess and Chorus Line across the girders of the ceiling of the ICA at u Penn. Describing Spero’s 2006 installation of selected motifs from her War series on the walls of the Drawing Center, New York, thomas Mcevilley wrote, “Helicopters crept around the walls at ceiling level, seeking their prey among art viewers.” When The Sacred and the Profane was installed at the Josh Baer Gallery in 1986, Mcevilley recalled it “ran just below the ceiling.” Mcevilley, “Spero’s Cry,” Art in America, May, 2006, 162.

15. Spero seems to have considered the absence of imagery or text on a page an equally critical compositional and narrative element.

16. Kunce in conversation with the author, January 31, 2013.

17. Nancy Spero, in “About Creation. An Interview with Stephan Götz, 1992,” Codex Spero, 118.

18. Nancy Spero, “Process, 1987,” Codex Spero, 115.

19. Barry Schwabsky, “No Images of Man,” The Nation, November 29, 2010, 26.

FOr C rYIN G Ou t L Ou D : N AN C Y SPer O’ S C R I D U C OEU R Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Although Nancy Spero’s Cri du Coeur (Cry of the Heart), 2005, is now encased in segments — eighteen transparent rectangles — there is still a palpable sense that it is a never-ending work and that it could go on, forever. the hand-printed paper frieze is one of her final pieces, completed just a year after the death of her husband, the artist Leon Golub, and only four years before her own passing at eighty-three. It is an oceanic, expansive installation that is saturated with sentiment — melancholia, grief, despair, and of course complaint, which is perhaps most apt since the French phrase also denotes a sincere and passionate appeal, one that, as Spero once noted is, “almost like praying or pleading with heaven.”2

For Spero the work was a protest too. Falling in line with much of her oeuvre, it is a specific rallying cry against war and violence from a feminist perspective. Originally installed to circumscribe the walls of New York’s Galerie Lelong at ground level, Cri du Coeur resembles a funeral procession, and indeed it was taken from an ancient

“How am I to speak frankly, to state what I consider of moment, to observe and document what is occurring now?” 1 depiction of one. the piece features a single image printed countless times on overlapping sheets of multihued paper: a crowd of lamenting ancient egyptian women, painted in the 14th century BCe on the tomb of ramose, governor of thebes. In some sections, the community of mourners appears in black silhouette, while in others Spero prints only traces of the women’s bodies — a random eye, suggestions of legs. the work in sum travels chromatically from day to night: from lighter hues to vivid shades to earthy tones, and finally to shadows (silhouettes) and smoke (rolled black pigment) at the finale. this variegated view suggests what one would observe while diving towards the bottom of a sea, to an underworld cloaked in darkness. We never step into liquid, however, as the installation produces a jagged choreography: the viewer must gaze down, and perhaps crouch or sit on the floor to view it carefully. Yet the faces, arms, and hands of the women stretch upwards at the ceiling, towards the cosmos, which produces a sense of uncertainty, of not knowing where to be or even to look, similar to how one might feel at a wake.

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A multifarious work, Cri du Coeur transforms Spero’s private loss into public lamentation, and at once addresses personal and universal topics such as aging, silencing, and impermanence, among others. It is also classic Spero in its feminist exploration of history, prolonging her dual position as artist-historian, a social role that she took up in the late 1960s when she began to make activist works about the Vietnam War and its connection to past conflicts and bygone forms of violence. With 1976’s Torture of Women—an epic, 125foot scroll—Spero began to work exclusively with a lexicon: images of women culled from literary, documentary, mythological, and archaic sources that she gathered into a “cast.” Just two years earlier she had also commenced with “cannibalizing” her own output, appropriating some of the figures from her previous pieces into new long scrolls. “I decided to address the issues I was actively involved in—women’s issues. I wanted to investigate the more palpable realities of torture and pain,” she said.3 Spero accomplished this task in numerous affective works that entailed fastidiously hand printing, painting, silk-screening, and collaging the figures onto scrolls or directly onto walls. Cri du Coeur is a testament to all of these methods, as well as to the fact that she was still vigorously working—perhaps harder than ever—near

the end of her life when she could hardly work at all.

One of the most striking aspects of the work is its energy, accumulation, and resultant momentum. A rhythm is stoked through the apparently endless repetitions, an effect very different from Spero’s previous works wherein the figures have more space and perhaps room to breathe. Cri du Coeur is more like a film with only one frame—so rapidly repeated that it starts to break down just as the projector’s lamp begins to burns out.

Gertrude Stein’s notion of the “continuous present” was also animated by pattern and emphatic repetition, and it equally recalls cinema (or more precisely the fact that generally each film frame repeats and subtly shifts the image that came before it). For some of her seminal literary works, such as 1926’s Composition as Explanation, Stein used the present progressive tense to work against the persistence of time and memory, so that her words could resemble a “beginning again,” a writing that reestablishes itself afresh and anew (and again!) in each passing moment. An example: the time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a present thing it has been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has been at times an endeavor at parts or all of

these things. In my beginning it was a continuous present a beginning again and again and again and again, it was a series it was a list it was a similarity and everything different it was a distribution and an equilibration. that is all of the time some of the time of the composition.4

In various interviews Spero claimed that her later, hand printed work was inspired by Stein’s modern sense of the prolonged present, as well as a Joycean stream of consciousness. With her cast of female characters she ultimately crafted a stock company in which the actresses/glyphs are re-established anew in each piece as they take on different roles, whether comic, tragic, or both. Sylvère Lotringer astutely referred to this effect as an “eerie historical chorus intensifying the action, modifying the mood of the piece, refracting its meaning emotionally.”5 ultimately, the troupe provided a way for Spero to “speak frankly,” and to “observe and document what is occurring now.” even though she often deployed historical and mythological figures in her works, Spero always pointed to the ways in which past forms carry a present meaning with them. to abruptly insert history onto the current moment as she did in so many pieces, was to perform a “temporal drag,” as the literary theorist elizabeth Freeman has called it—a pulling of the past upon the present.6

Spero’s cast and crew perform this anachronistic drag to rewrite history—to examine what has been left out, covered up, and to discover other ruptures that are still ripe for examination. Finally, I want to suggest that Spero’s temporal drag in Cri du Coeur shows us how history, or for that matter time, and our linked notions of progress are never linear, never marching only forward. rather Spero insists in her wonderful recyclings and reoccurrences that to study history and also to attempt to be present while doing so, we must always be aware of this stuttering—this beginning again, and again.

N OteS

1. Nancy Spero, “Sky Goddess. egyptian Acrobat,” Artforum 26, 10 (March 1988), 103-105.

2. Nancy Spero, in “Cri du Coeur: excerpt from an Interview with Susan Sollins, 2007,” roel Arkesteijn, ed., Codex Spero: Nancy Spero— Selected Writings and Interviews 1950-2008 (Amsterdam: roma Publications, 2008), 164.

3. “Jo Anna Issak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,” Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), 18.

4. Stein, Gertrude, “Composition as explanation,” Dydo, ulla e., ed., A Stein Reader (evanston: Northwestern university Press, 1993), 502.

5. Lotringer, Sylvère, “explicit Material,” Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), 104.

6. Freeman, elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham and London: Duke university Press, 2010).

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AC KN OWL eD GM eN tS

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the Worcester Art Museum presentation of Nancy Spero: Cri du Coeur and the accompanying publication are due to the collective expertise and commitment of numerous individuals. Foremost among them are Don and Mary Melville, whose financial and emotional commitment to the Museum’s program in contemporary art enables us to bring the work of leading contemporary artists like Nancy Spero to the Worcester Art Museum.

I thank Mary Sabbatino, Vice President of Galerie Lelong, and the following members of her staff for their expert and kind assistance along every step in the process of organizing this project: Dede Young, Bianca Cabrera, and Hannah Adkins. I am appreciative of the illuminating essay contributed by Lauren O’Neill-Butler.

For his ongoing support of the contemporary program,

I thank Matthias Waschek, Director. the talents, dedication, and friendship of the following colleagues at the Museum were vital to this project: Patrick Brown, exhibition Designer and Chief Preparator; Joseph Leduc, registrar; Kate Dalton, Curatorial Assistant; Kim Noonan, Manager of Publications and Graphic Design; and Stephen Briggs, Photographer. Lastly, I extend a heartfelt thanks to Samm Kunce, former studio assistant to Spero, whose intimate insights into the artist’s work and intentions were invaluable to this installation of Cri du Coeur.

Susan Stoops

Curator of Contemporary Art

ABOu t tH e ArtISt

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Nancy Spero was born in 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where, in 1945, she met Leon Golub and in 1949 received a BFA. She continued her studies in Paris at the ecole des Beaux-Arts and Atelier Andre L’hote. After spending a year in New York, in 1951 Spero married Golub and they settled in Chicago. Following a year in Italy and an extended stay in Paris from 1959-1964, Spero, with Golub and their three sons, returned to New York where she lived and worked until her death in 2009.

Major monographic exhibitions of Spero’s work have been shown at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2011); Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2008); de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2008); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2004); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany (2002); and Institute of

Contemporary Art, London (1987). She has been featured in numerous biennials including Bienal de São Paulo (2010); Venice Biennale (2007); Whitney Biennial (2006 and 1993); Kwangju Biennale (2000); International Biennale of Cairo (1998); and Documenta X (1997).

Spero’s work is represented in numerous museum collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Miami Art Museum; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte reina Sofia, Madrid; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Galerie of Canada, Ottawa; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

the estate of Nancy Spero is represented by Galerie Lelong.

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Nancy Spero in her studio, 2003.

Photograph Š Abe Frajndlich 2013

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