Nancy Spero: a continuous present

As early as the 1960s, Nancy Spero's work was breaking ranks with the establishment. Her unique pictorial vocabulary and insistent political engagement was a far cry--and a loud cry--from the styles of abstraction that dominated the American art world at that time. She articulated and has continued to drive at themes of burning interest to protest against the Vietnam War, the alienation of society and violence against women, for example against Jewish woman under National Socialism and in the historical contexts of witch hunts. A Continuous Present pairs her War Series (1966-70), a cycle of anti-Vietnam War gouaches, with an overview of her work from the last decade. Between 1992 and 2001, Spero created infinite-seeming works on long horizontal and vertical bands of paper--a format borrowed from Egyptian papyrus rolls, Chinese scroll painting and antique friezes--populating them with female figures taken from mythology, various epochs and diverse cultures, giving them feminist momentum via highly charged or parodistic confrontations.