The DirtyDurty Diary

Prolific Artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009)

Nancy Spero, an artist my mother revered past away this Sunday, October 18, 2009. She was a brilliant artist and if you hadn’t heard of her, now is the time to discover her luminous body of work.

Here is a statement from GALERIE LELONG:

Nancy Spero, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, died Sunday, October 18, 2009, in New York City.  For over fifty years, Spero made the female experience central to her art’s formal and thematic development.  Her radical career encompassed many significant visual and cultural movements from Conceptual Art to Post-Modernism to Feminism.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and l’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Spero lived in Italy briefly and then in Paris, where she remained until moving to New York in 1964.  In Europe, Spero produced her first significant works, the Black Paintings-somber, figurative works allusive of existential oppositions and emotional turmoil.  These works were made at a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were the focuses in the art world, marking Spero’s first consistent oppositions to the prevailing conventions in art making. 

Nancy Spero’s return to the U.S. in 1966 coincided with the height of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.  In this charged political climate, her passionate engagement with these issues engendered the groundbreaking aesthetic style and the political and feminist themes for which she is now known.   The War Series was Spero’s first significant body of work on paper, a support she would favor for the majority of her working career.  Described by Spero as “broadsides,” The War Series depicted women and children as victims of war and suffering, a theme that would occupy Spero for the next forty years.  Though exhibited rarely in their time, The War Series works were more recently exhibited to great acclaim, including in Documenta X in 1997 and in Nancy Spero: The War Series at Galerie Lelong in 2003.

Following The War Series, Spero produced two bodies of work: the Artaud Paintings and the Codex Artaud series, based on the French poet Antonin Artaud, whom Spero described as the “most extreme writer of the 20th Century.”   In reading Artaud, Spero coined the term “victimage,” making a parallel between Artaud’s language and her feeling of the “loss of tongue” as a female artist in a male-dominated art world.  One of Spero’s great inventions was the fracturing of text and image in the Codex Artaud works, which some critics have described as the first works of Post-Modernism.  Following the Artaud series, Spero began work on her pioneering and critically lauded scroll series: Hours of the Night, 1974 (collection Whitney Museum of American Art), Notes in Time on Women, 1979 (collection Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Torture of Women, 1976 (collection National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).
Earlier this year, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria awarded Spero the Herbert Boeckl Prize and presented her exhibition Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist.  In 2008, the Museu d’art Contemporani Barcelona organized a full-scale retrospective, Nancy Spero: Dissidances, which traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville.  The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris will present a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2010.  During her long career, monographic museum exhibitions of Spero’s work have been held at de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Frac Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; The Power Plant, Toronto; and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among many others.
Nancy Spero was married to the artist Leon Golub (1922-2004) for over fifty years.  In 1996, together they received the Hiroshima Art Prize—awarded to contemporary artists for their achievements in promoting world peace—and exhibited at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.  A joint retrospective of their works, War and Memory: Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, was presented by the American Center, Paris in 1994 and traveled to the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia.  Spero is survived by her three sons—Stephen Golub of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Philip Golub of Paris; and Paul Golub of Paris—five grandchildren; and sister, Carol Newman of Portland, Oregon

GALERIE LELONG Located at 528 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001         ph 212.315.0470

My Life in Fame

I find it interesting that the movie “Fame” has been remade and is going to be in theatres again soon. I’m not surprised given that Hollywood has long since run out of ideas are doing what Broadway has done for years, “reissue the crowd-pleasers and hope not to hemorrhage additional money.”

However, I think in this particular case, it’s serving the purpose of fueling our lust filled obsession with all things FAME.
Memories are selective, but my first brush with fame was when I was four years old.

I was watching my father play basketball for the Denver Nuggets. The moment half time took place I thought that it was my cue to go and greet him as he came off the court. As I burst out towards him, I looked up and was mesmerized by the lights. I stood still, center court, for a moment enchanted by the people filling the stands. He swept me up in his arms urging me to go back to my seat. I looked up at him and simply said, “FUN!” He looked back at me and said, “No, it’s a lot of work.”

With that one sentence my father took away any illusion fame might have held for me, but it didn’t take away my fascination for the people that wished to be bathed in that kind of light - the one my father had grown accustom to.
As a child, I would slip on my mother’s pink silk pajama’s, and then with a cup of tea in hand (I thought this was the height of sophistication), I watched ‘Solid Gold’ and ‘Dance Fever’ back to back. I danced in my living room, sang into a hair brush, and would memorize lines from Shakespeare in my room (which disturbed by brother Matisse as he thought I was losing my mind saying the words out loud to myself). My mother fed my curiosity by enlisting me in vocal lessons, dance, and acting classes.

I loved auditioning, but was anxiety ridden right before each performance. Just moments before taking the stage, I would look at whichever stage hand was next to me before my entrance and ask, “Why am I doing this to myself?”
Perhaps that is why, after years of a performing arts school and going to college for BFA theatre, I suddenly found myself behind the scenes; nurturing performers, extinguishing their fears, or helping them find the scope or direction of their careers.

I have thousands of stories over the years with those that have commanded center stage, but my name dropping days are over. Besides it’s so passé.  I often wonder why we do name drop, and why it’s so important for us to want to be a celebrity, or to be ‘friends’ with a celebrity?  Why do we spend so much time reading about them or wishing for their rise or fall?
I’ve seen the lights, but I have also seen them turn off.  It’s all an illusion.  The people I am fascinated by now are people like my sister-in-law Holly, who sits with cancer patients holding their hand while they are treated. She looks to bring them comfort in their most fearful hours; and my other sister-in-law Bridget, who as a speech pathologist, helping children every day to express themselves just a little bit better.

We need our artists because they contribute so much, but we also need our healers, teachers, scientists, and many others who contribute to our society every day. I wish we would give them more credit. The kind we give to those that sculpt, memorize lines, design, model, and write songs. But maybe we don’t because those things are too real - we prefer escapism and distraction so much more.
Just because your life doesn’t take place on stage doesn’t mean it’s not utterly valid, and those people who make their living on stage, in front of a canvas, typewriter, or behind a camera do have some brilliant moments.  But as my father said, “it’s hard work,” and a little lonely.

Mostly, I wish we would stop envying others and wake up to the miracle that we already are - bathed in the light of our own lives.

The Business of Art

The business of art is a tricky one.

I have been on both sides of the equation since I was eight years old. I was holding my grandfather’s hand at the Watkins Gallery at American University in Washington D.C. while he talked to the curators about his works and their worth.

I asked my grandfather, “How do you put a value on art?”

“Well mi hija, that’s complicated. But, I do know there is value in the thought process, the work, and completing the piece. After that, you have to just hope that someone finds connection in it, rather than them just trying to match something to their living room couch.”

My grandfather much preferred to be in the art studio, or having a cup of tea with his five close friends talking art and philosophy, considerably more than dealing with curators, clients, and the gallery owners. He didn’t like the business of art at all. So much so that he refused many sales on his paintings if he didn’t like a particular client’s attitude. He could afford to be discriminating as he was a professor at both the University of New Mexico and American University. My mother on the other hand embraced the business aspect of art and was a quintessential saleswoman.

She did what it took to sale her jewelry, smiling and laughing at obtuse comments thrown her way all for a sale that might help aid in paying the bills and groceries for us, her three children. Because of her furiocity as a saleswoman, we went from welfare and a week of homelessness, to owning a house, a new Audi, and clothes that were bought in department stores instead of the Salvation Army.

In my room above my writing desk I have a picture of my grandfather and my mother together. They both passed away within a month of each other almost 20 years ago.

I find that my philosophy is in the middle of both of theirs. I know that I have to do some things that I am not too enthusiastic about in order to aid in book sales, but I also know that sometimes you have to let go, to put your work out there for public consumption, scrutiny, to know when and when not to compromise, but more importantly I have to just continue the thought process, create, and finish the work.

Beso- Maya Contreras