Nancy Spero

Visual Arts Award
The quickest way to familiarize oneself with the work of Nancy Spero is to ride the 1/9 Broadway local train and hop off at the 66th St, Lincoln Center station. There, one encounters a surprise: embedded in the walls of the station are subtle and beautifully wrought mosaics of women, some made of glittering tiles, others in ghostly white, all the handiwork of an enormously gifted artist.
Depictions of women are Nancy Spero’s specialty, in fact, since 1974, she has focused exclusively on images of women, many of whom are archetypically Jewish. Social and political themes have also been a focus in her work since the 1960’s, when she produced such works as the War Series (1966-1970), the Codex Artaud (1971-72) and Torture of Women, (1974-1976). She has participated in numerous art projects and events which address political issues, including The Peace Tower, Los Angeles (1966), Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam (1964-72) and Artists’ Call Against US Intervention in Central American (1984), to name a few.
A resident of New York, Nancy Spero’s first exhibitions in New York were at AIR, the all-women’s cooperative gallery, which she helped found. Solo exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and a traveling retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Nancy Spero is married to the visual artist Leon Golub, who received a JCAA award in 1995. An exhibition called Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory, was organized in 1994 by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and traveled to the American Center in Paris. Nancy Spero and Leon Golub were jointly awarded the 3rd Hiroshima Art Prize and retrospective exhibition in 1995.
In places as far-flung as Australia to cities as close as Washington, DC, the public has been able to view the work of Nancy Spero.
Besides the 66th Street Subway station, other New York venues that have featured the work of Nancy Spero include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and The Museum of Modern Art.