Nancy Spero
American Painter, Collage, and Installation Artist
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
New York, USA
Summary of Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero's career moves forth on a seamless figurative journey, beginning with lovers painted on heavy black ground to culminate in a whole host of female characters initially united by collage and then dispersed widely across white gallery walls. Whilst Spero's media and subject matter changed with time - moving between themes of family, the Vietnam War, and the subjugation of women - her work always retained an immersive quality. As a first generation American Feminist artist, married to fellow creative, Leon Golub, and known for giving Antonin Artaud a voice, Spero dispels any notion of a fixed and singular identity and instead sings within a large chorus drawn from all phases of history and culture. She draws upon a plethora of goddesses, famous personalities, and religious icons from her own visual archive. Indeed her art reveals that our mundane everyday existence is also a constant magical dialogue with myths and symbols. Feeling as a young artist alienated from the art world, by her latter years she was revered and respected in that very same arena, even being asked to re-design a New York subway station. As struggling figures jump from the canvas to be released into architectural space or to dance around city streets, it is as though through a lifetime of making that Nancy Spero achieved the ultimate goal, she set herself free.
Accomplishments
- Spero expresses deep interest in origins and in the primordial. She depicts early female archetypes, makes use of the scroll formation in her work, and calls one series, 'the first language'. She includes early Christian figures like Lilith, and Egyptian goddesses like Maat, proposing the idea to viewers that it is only via absorption into where we come from (i.e. a return to the source), that we can subsequently best appreciate who we are and where we are going.
- She shows women suffering, be it by suppression under patriarchy or through the experience of actual bodily harm. Overall, she is an artist who well expresses the difficult to articulate language of a body in pain, a notion investigated in detail by theorist Elaine Scarry. Alongside figures like Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith, Spero was a pioneer in making collectively visible what is usually the individual invisible experience of hurt. This 'hurt' becomes psychological as well as physical.
- The artist's use of different techniques and media, from painting, to printing, to collage, to working directly onto the wall, and also using text along with image emphasizes the timeless aspect of her project. Not only does Spero look across history for subject matter, she also experiments with past processes such as fresco and mosaic. In this sense, she looks back for method as well as for message. The practice in particular of combining word and image link Spero to the likes of Hilma af Klint and William Blake and suggests that she is not only a visual artist, but also a mystic, a philosopher, and a poet.
- Spero's oeuvre opens up the essentialist debate whereby academics are worried by an artist's strong identification with nature. Progressive modernism seeks to avoid trapping women in the arguably socially constructed role of life giver and mother and thus finds the celebration of powerful ancient feminine archetypes difficult to rationalize. Spero however, along with artists Kiki Smith and Francesca Woodman, understood that her relationship with age-old female connectivity was important, and more of a complex mythical and spiritual idea, rather than a straight forward social and historical one.
Progression of Art
Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge)
This painting is one of Nancy Spero's earliest works as a trained artist - produced just nine years after the completion of her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago - and possibly her first attempt to incorporate text in the plane of the image. In a conversation with writer and curator Jo Anna Isaak published in 1996, Spero described what is depicted in the painting as follows: "[There is] a tombstone right in the middle, and then on each side are two heads with dunce caps and rabbit-like ears, and their tongues are sticking out. And on this phallic-like tombstone... are the initials of the artists who were prevalent then... On top I wrote, 'I do not challenge,' and then 'Homage to New York' below."
While apparently neutral, this description betrays the painting's ironic quality and tone. The statement "I do not challenge" is humorously reversed in the work by the act of symbolically burying a number of artists, all associated with Abstract Expressionism, and who were Spero's contemporaries and very much alive in 1958. Despite its title then, the work is not homemade in homage, it is a mockery, a slap in the face, and a call to action for the non-dominant artists around at the time. As art-historian Mignon Nixon suggests in her essay 'Spero's Curses' (2007), the very manner in which Spero painted this picture is revealing. "Produced, coincidentally, around the same time Marcel Duchamp cast a deadpan self-portrait inscribed With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959) - a work often interpreted as a cunning critique of Abstract Expressionism's heroic posturing - Spero's parody conversely is expressionistic in tone," Nixon observes, "mimicking in its liquid, gestural application of paint the self-conscious performance of alienated, dumb virility that had become a defining characteristic of late-modernist painting." Later on in the same text, the author argues that the tongues, sticking out of the mouths of the two twin figures, "dramatize the author's own exclusion from speech, underscoring the futility of the gesture that is being enacted." Indeed, Spero often spoke of a certain feeling of being silenced: "I felt like a non-artist, a non-person," she once stated, "I had no world, I could not function in the world I was in." Her decision to displace her signature in Homage to New York, from the bottom to the middle of the canvas, so that it's now positioned in a direct contrast with that "select class of artists so well known that their initials alone are adequate to represent them," can, too, be seen as a device which enhances the experience of exclusion communicated in the work. "Spero's 'I'," writes Nixon, "is that of the subject whose rebellion falls on deaf ears."
What is worth noting in connection to Homage to New York is that, while it is certainly the case that the work constitutes a "critique of the masculine politics of the New York School of the fifties", as Britany Salsbury has put it, some of the artists that Spero "buries" here are, in fact, female. The work might, then, be better understood as communicating a sense of an outside which is derived from Spero's experience of being a figurative artist in an age of abstraction, rather than simply or only that of being female. Reflecting upon her early years as an artist, Spero once said that "anger gave impetus to the work. That, and literally sticking out my tongue at all of this, at all of the heroes, the so called authorities." The very "idea of monument," she stated, "is mostly a phallus." She sticks her tongue out to the sway of conceptual and abstract intellectualism, and radically dares to follow bodily intuition.
Oil on Canvas - Galerie Lelong, New York
Lovers I
Nancy Spero's Lovers I belongs to a series of twenty-five works known as The Black Paintings, for the most part produced between 1961 and 1965, while the artist was living in Paris. Emerging against the dark backdrop of the canvas, the figures delineated here by Spero appear to be embracing, facing each other as they recline. The title guides us in understanding the relationship between the two silhouettes, which otherwise remain indeterminate - their gender, age, and identity are unknown to us - bestowing the work an enigmatic quality. In her own words, "these paintings are about timeless subjects which continually appear in our society. They dealt with lovers, great mothers, children and prostitutes..." The rough, intuitive manner in which Spero renders her figures as well as their background, making it difficult to know exactly where one ends and the other begins - the way, that is, in which her figures, while standing independent, often merge into one another - is central to the sort of experience that the work is intended to produce. As the TATE describes: "Spero ultimately came to see these paintings as being about the isolation we all experience in love - the necessity for distance and separation within the state of connection with another ... The tension between these two elements (figures separated and yet joined) expresses the poignancy of this eternal lovers' conundrum."
It is perhaps worth noting here that despite their unfinished quality, the deeply evocative works that Spero presents us with in The Black Paintings series, often occupied the artist for months at a time. Examined against or within the larger context of Spero's artistic output, this series of paintings stand for an art of which the meaning is not so much political, as with many of her subsequent, more known works, but profoundly personal. This is all the more significant when one considers that Spero's decision to move from Chicago to Paris in 1959, was motivated by a need, shared by her life-long partner, Leon Golub, to "bypass New York" - at the time a much larger center for art than Paris - and the then-dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism, so as to find a place that would, as Spero put it, allow her "the freedom to create in an individual way." Despite, however, being 'personal' works, the dark, many layered canvases already reveal the far and wide searching language that Spero was to develop. The ground appears heavily layered and thus ancient, and the drawing is loose and free, pointing towards the elemental drive towards creation. When considered together, the ground and the marks upon it, the works recall early cave paintings. Even when simply depicting herself and her love, Spero suggests a harking back to the origins that we all share.
Oil paint on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
A cycle of the Universe is Finished - Artaud
A cycle of the Universe is Finished - Artaud forms part of a larger project that Spero undertook between 1969 and 1972, only four years after relocating to NYC from Paris, and throughout which she engaged in a complicated dialogue with the writings of French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud. Painted in capital, disorderly letters, Artaud's quote "A cycle of the universe is finished" is accompanied here by a red ascending arrow and an illustration of a sphere at the core of which appears to be a human figure. While the precise meaning of the work is not immediately clear, one could, without doubt, understand it as a response to the political and cultural unrest that defined the late 1960s, an era shadowed by the Vietnam war and marked by the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, the figure at the centre of the universe depicted by Spero in this work appears, upon closer inspection, to be a black woman or man. The artist's deep, continuous interest in Artaud at the time points towards this dialogue as the most significant aspect of the work.
Active during the first part of the twentieth century, Artaud is a figure whose life was defined by a series of unfortunate events, and a long-standing battle with mental illness. Between 1943 and 1946, he received fifty-one electroshock treatments, intended to eliminate his symptoms, but which plunged the author into an even deeper confrontation with what he perceived to be his "demons." It was, it appears, not only the contemporary relevance of his writings, but this painful personal history that was the source of Spero's fascination with Artaud. Clayton Eshleman, an American poet and a friend of the artist, recalled that Spero was "bowled over by Artaud's seething consternation and seemed amazed that a man could suffer as Artaud claimed he did, as if such suffering usually belonged to women ... it was this identification in suffering that enabled her to relate to his anger and apocalyptic pronouncements." Indeed, in an interview with Jo Anna Isaak from 1965, Spero stated that she "chose to use Artaud's writings, because he screams and yells and rants and raves about his tongue being cut off, castrated. He has no voice, he's silenced in a bourgeois society." In the years to follow A cycle of the Universe is Finished - Artaud, and upon completing the remarkable Artaud Codex in 1972, Spero would choose to focus her practice on articulating the suffering and objectification of women throughout history, becoming one of the foremost political and feminist artists working in the U.S. until her death in 2009. "Although we will probably never know exactly what demons Nancy herself was exorcising in her two Artaud projects, Eshleman once said, "it seems clear to me that especially the latter work was a central rite of passage for her ..."
Judging A cycle of the Universe is Finished - Artaud from the perspective of Spero's own attitude towards life, inferred not only from her uninterrupted activist practice but from her very determination to continue to create - this despite a feeling of marginalization which, although Spero never spoke of directly, is largely understood to have been part of her experience as a female artist and a mother - one is inclined to say that the work should be understood positively: as an attempt at renewal, and the beginning of a new, upward movement or cycle in human as well as individual history.
The Codex Artaud series that followed these individual works on paper was typically presented on scrolls. Images often featured serpents with their tongues sticking out and lactating Romulus/Remus wolves feeding their screaming youths. There are references to be made with the Creation Story, and also to Spero's own experience at the time feeding three hungry boys. It was as though the artist shared the same experience as Artaud of being extremely physically tested, while yet still insisting on having a voice, on speaking, on existing. Artaud, an equally brilliant artist as well as poet, made self-portraits of himself with holes piercing his skin, as though only through a process of self-mutilation could he experience a sense of relief from the heaviness within. It was perhaps through the aggressive gesture of cutting for collage that Spero felt a similar release, and such was a process necessary for the deepest of self-exploration.
Gouache, ink, and handprinted collage on paper - Galerie Lelong, New York
They Will Torture You, My Friend
Made in 1971, They Will Torture You, My Friend is the result of a collaboration between Nancy Spero and her long-life partner and figurative painter Leon Golub. Widely recognized as an exemplary instance of 1970s protest art, the work was Spero and Golub's contribution towards the influential Conspiracy: The Artist as Witness portfolio, the purpose of which was to raise funds for the legal defense of a group of anti-Vietnam war activists, charged - in what is known as the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial - with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. That Spero and Golub would want to take part in the effort to overturn the conviction of the 'Chicago Eight' comes as no surprise, as the two artists not only shared a special connection to the city of Chicago, but were, at the time, already engaged in deeply political projects and practices. Spero's exploration of the situation of the artist, exemplified by Antonin Artaud, informs her part of the collaboration, wherein a human figure, encircled by a trail of blood-red ink, appears to be falling or to have fallen. This is a simple, but effective representation of war, and furthermore, of violence administered upon the innocent individual. "When we came back from Paris," Spero said in an interview, "I really reacted to the Vietnam War and to the media coverage of it. I wanted to do something immediately, I was so enraged. Coming back from Europe, I was shocked that our country - which had this wonderful idea of democracy - was doing this terrible thing in Vietnam. I wanted to make images to express the obscenity of war."
A very different artist from Spero in many ways - "How different her delicate figures are against my brutes!" he once observed - Golub nonetheless shared her passion for a confrontational art. In 'Leon Golub and Nancy Spero talk about art and political commitment', he commented on They Will Torture You, My Friend as well their respective, solo practices: "We have wanted to record what occurs," he said, "preserving a sense of the intrinsic dignity of those who are being victimized, their quality as individuals, even though we're not picturing them as particular people. Although Nancy uses the print process to repeat a particular form, she has a remarkable capacity for giving a unique figure a range of representations."
Married in 1951, the couple remained together, working side by side in their shared studio, until Golub's death in 2004 at the age of 82.
Color lithograph - The Lawrence and Regina Dubin Family Collection
South Africa
From 1976 onwards, the story of women became Nancy Spero's main preoccupation as an artist. Once again using the scroll format, in 1979 she worked continuously on Notes in Time on Women. This series uses images of forgotten, unseen, and invented women, all working together in collective memory for the vision of a more peaceful and supportive future for all persons. For theorist, Julia Kristeva, Notes in Time on Women illustrates the repetition and eternity of life.
South Africa from 1981 is one of many works to come out of such a practice of Spero's interest in the ancient feminine. Drawing from a vast archive of images of female figures that the artist compiled throughout the years, and juxtaposing a selection of them with cut-out sections of text sourced from Amnesty International reports documenting the country's victimization of women, Spero calls our attention to a particular chapter from the history of the subjugation of women - a gesture repeated in Argentina from the same year.
The artist's choice to include here not one but multiple figures, their positioning and, finally, their differentiation in movement suggests that the work is not to be seen as a static image, but interpreted, rather, as the unfolding of a narrative. The crawling figure, based on an image of a woman irradiated in Hiroshima and placed directly onto or against the text as it is, represents, in most efficient a manner, the woman suffering; while the female heads overprinted right at the top of the text, as one image repeated three times, can be interpreted as pointing to the fact that the woman suffering is, in fact, not one but many - to the reality, that is, that the text below them refers not to a single incident, but to a collective history instead. The material condition of the text itself is telling, suggests New York based artist and writer Thomas Micchelli, who says, "What remains of their content is more memento than mission, the names stamped on their surfaces functioning as loci on a map of universal suffering rather than datelines for dispatches from the hottest hotspots in Hell." But what about the figure floating on the lower left part of the work? It is this figure that makes Spero's South Africa most interesting and inspiring a work, for, if we allow ourselves to read it as representing the final stage in the story being told here by the artist, she is the woman who, having crawled completely out and away from the text, has managed to break free of that history of suffering the text refers to; to liberate herself. Her image, borrowing the stance of that of a "classical athlete represented mid-motion, suggests," writes art writer for the journal Art in America David Markus, that "she is rising from the ashes."
When perceived in this way, South Africa functions as a link that connects Spero's previous imagery in works such as Torture of Women completed in 1976 and her more vibrant, humorous collages from the 1980s and 1990s which, celebrating women as "emblems of strength and self-sufficiency," offer, as Markus argues, "a counterview to the her-story of victimhood Spero strove tirelessly to bring to light throughout her career." In an interview from 1987, Spero stated: "I still investigate woman as victim because woman is still the victim par excellence, but now I stress women in charge of their lives."
Handprinting and typewriter collage on paper - Galerie Lelong, New York
To Soar
Indeed, many installation works of the late 1980s and 1990s, really do emphasize the freedom that women have won through their trials and tribulations. In To Soar, installed on the ceiling of the Harold Washington R.B. Library in Chicago, Spero's collection of female characters literally take to the sky. The goddess Nut cartwheels whilst athletes run and others raise their arms in celebration. There is a vulture goddess flying away and the space becomes boundless, endless, more open-ended than even the scroll works exhibited previously.
The artist shows us that her interests lie on the peripheries. Spero completely breaks down the hierarchy of traditional art display and reveals to the viewer that there are many ways and angles from which to perceive and contemplate. Overall, the impact of To Soar is magical, it is enchanting, and raises our perception of life to a liminal space that exists somewhere between the ground and the heavens. The view of life that Spero proposes in this work is one more spiritual than most, presenting an everyday imbued with celestial lightness and infinite possibility.
Hand printing on ceiling - Harold Washington R.B. Library in Chicago
Maypole: Take No Prisoners II
Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is the last major work that Nancy Spero undertook, before her death in October 2009. Originally conceived for the 2007 Venice Biennale and intended to occupy the main entry hall of the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini, Maypole presents the viewer with a host of heads, decapitated and screaming. Hanging from silk ribbons and steel chains attached to a thirty-foot aluminum pole positioned at the centre of the piece, these human-scale faces - rendered in a mixture of frontal, profile and three-quarter views - hover above the viewer in a way which forces a physical encounter with them. As art historian Deborah Frizell points out, these are faces of death that we have seen before - a continuation of Spero's work on "victimage" and "cannibalised", as the artist herself put it, from her war paintings of the 1960s.
"Spero's terrifying heads," writes Frizell, "first appeared in her early dark oil paintings, Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You (1960) and Nightmare Figures II (1961). These heads were stormy demons, disembodied, taunting and cursing with hyperbolic fury. Like the painted metal cut-out heads dangling on the Venice Maypole, red tongues flicking, these nightmare-black angels spit and snarled, their streamlined "wings" flapping at their sides." The difference between Spero's early heads and those that confront us in Maypole is, as has already been pointed out, that the latter have broken free of the flat surface of the canvas or paper. They are double-sided, giving a three-dimensional form that cannot but enhance its reality. As Frizell writes, Maypole is "very much a public sculpture that requires the space of the polis, the space of appearance and dialogue, activated by the viewer/citizen. It is as public an object as the medieval executioner's stakes on which the severed heads of the condemned would fester and rot in rows on the civic square for all to witness."
That Spero intended for the work to have this immediately social, political dimension is undeniable. In a review of the Nancy Spero retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery and which took place after the artist's death in 2009, Eleanor Nairne wrote that "Spero hoped that the faces she had 'cannibalized' from her 1960s responses to the Vietnam War would resonate with the Anglo-American involvement in Iraq. Today, she argued, "the gently swaying severed heads (hung at head-height) take us to the recent revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya." Still angry, and ready to protest when necessary, although no longer confined to the page, these figures are now bound by chains. A far cry from To Soar, it seems that Spero oscillates throughout her life between feelings of great liberation and utter exploitation.
Steel, silk, wood, nylon monofilament, handprint on aluminium - Dimensions Variable. Anthony Reynolds Gallery
Biography of Nancy Spero
Childhood and Education
Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926 to a family with a Jewish background. A year later, her family moved to Chicago, where Spero remained until age 23. In an interview for the Brooklyn Rail with art historian Stephanie Buhmann, Spero reflected on her early years, observing that she had decided to become an artist because it was the only thing she was really interested in. "For me," she said, "it was all about making art. It was the only thing that I really wanted to do and the only thing that I seemed to have some talent in. In those days, in Chicago, it wasn't such a glamorous thing to be a visual artist." As a dealer of used print-presses, Spero's father Henry Spero was, apparently, indifferent to her decision to become an artist: "Anything that wouldn't lead me too far from home seemed to be fine. My mother, as I recall, seemed to go along with my father." Thus without any real objection from her family, while at the same time without any real support, Spero enrolled at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. It was there that she met Leon Golub, her future husband, who had just returned from service in WWII and was now studying towards his masters at the Art Institute.
For a year, Spero lived in Paris, continuing her training as an artist at the Élive Nationale Supponale des Beaux-Arts and at the Atelier of Andre Lhote, an early Cubist painter. When she returned to Chicago, at the age of 24, she married Golub. "We lived and worked together," she described, "and it was pretty wonderful - a perpetual dialogue. The influence was mutual." A few years later, having had two sons and feeling disappointed with the state of the art-world in America, at the time dominated by Abstract Expressionism, the couple decided to escape and to look for a new, more open environment in which to make work. As described by the Tate: "Spero and Golub were equally committed to exploring a modernist representation of the human form, with its narratives and art historical resonances, even as Abstract Expressionism was becoming the dominant idiom."
Between 1957 and 1959 the couple lived in Italy and in Bloomington, Indiana. They then moved to Paris, where they stayed for five years and Spero gave birth to their third son. It was also in Paris at this moment that Spero created her first really mature works, the enigmatic Black Painting series. This highly creative phase included a series of paintings of lovers which although dark in palette were calm in tone. By contrast, works like Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You (1960) and Nightmare Figures II (1961) were more frenzied, with severed heads sticking out their tongues cleverly making reference to both the demons of patriarchy, and to the artist's own crying babies.
Mature Period
In 1964, the family returned to America and settled in New York. "When we came back from Europe," remembers Spero, "we had three young sons. With Leon and even a male dog that made five men in the family. That was pretty heavy duty." This was also a period of political crisis which affected Spero profoundly. "We were immediately confronted with the Vietnam War through the media (even as we were simultaneously trying to track my cousin who was in the summer Olympics!). That's when I became really upset about what was going on in Vietnam. That's what changed my whole perspective on the work that I was going to do. I started to paint the war in this crazy way. In the beginning, I focused on bombs, helicopters [...] I stopped painting the Black paintings, which took forever to paint and I could only do five a year at the most. The war paintings I would make very rapidly and angrily." Indeed Spero abandoned oil painting altogether and, from 1966 to 1970, focused on "furious ink and gouache drawings on paper that articulated the obscenity of war," as New York-based writer Phoebe Hoban describes them.
It was around the same time that the artist became interested with what she called the "victimage" of women, focusing her practice on making visible a variety of local histories of female subjugation. What is more, she began looking for ways to become engaged with the world in a more active, immediate way - extending her feminism and activism beyond her practice as an artist. "During the late sixties," she told Buhmann, "I started to hear about radical women activists, such as the radical feminist collective, The Redstockings, who were not focused on the arts, but on doing radical actions. So there was all this exciting stuff going on. That's when I really got interested in these feminist groups. At first, a friend took me to AWC (Art Workers Coalition) meetings, which were made up of men and women and then I heard about an offshoot, a women group called WAR (Women Artists in Revolution). I loved it. I was so angry at that time about so many things, especially about not being able to get my art out, to get people to look. I thought, "WAR" - that's it. We started to organize some actions and protests and wrote manifestos. For example, a few of us marched into the Museum of Modern Art and demanded equality for women artists. Then, I joined another, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists. It all went very fast in those days."
In 1972, Spero joined the founding committee of the Artist in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.), an initiative dedicated to exhibiting work by women. "We were very firm that this was not a man-hating group of women artists," Spero claimed, "but I was frustrated. I couldn't get my voice out; it was like I was being pushed down [...] I saw you have to have a base in which to be planted so you can go out and see what's going on and kind of confront the art world with a little bit more assurance."
Late Period
By the beginning of the 1980s Spero had already begun to assemble her well-known "cast" of female characters. Sourced from a variety of different images and cultures, these figures - including Lilith, Medusa, and the Irish fertility goddesss Sheela-Na-Gig - were invested by Spero with a different energy or role depending each time on the work. By 1988, her art had evolved from works on paper to installations, with the artist now printing her figures directly onto the walls of galleries and of public spaces. Suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, which progressively affected control of movement in her hands, Spero eventually decided to employ assistants, turning her practice into a collaborative process that would allow her to continue to create until the very end of her life. From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, Spero had installed installation pieces all across the world.
"Being with Leon and having my three beautiful sons," she said in a conversation for the Brooklyn Rail with Phong Bui at the age of 82, "I am really blessed in a lot of ways. Otherwise, by living day-to-day, one realizes the firmness of cruelty, what people do to each other. But then one realizes that it's always built with double meaning of the conflicted self. Whether it's through language and gesture and thoughts, and so on..." The tone of this interview well exemplifies a contradiction that lived within Spero throughout her life, one of lightness, and joy, and a great overall appreciation of life combined with ongoing struggle, a heaviness, and deep disappointment in humanity's general will towards destruction.
The Legacy of Nancy Spero
Today, Spero is widely recognized as one of the most influential women artists of her generation. "She is a major 20th-century artist," said Fordham University professor of art history Jo Anna Isaak, who has helped curate several exhibitions of Spero's work. "I think that she is now assuming her proper role and getting her critical due." One of the artists to openly acknowledge the tremendous influence of Spero's work is Kiki Smith. Art Historian, Jon Bird curated a crucial major exhibition called Otherworlds in 2003 that well united and showcased the work of Smith and Spero.
Working directly onto the wall, Spero's technique recalls ancient fresco painting, but simultaneously her cut and paste approach of placing individual figures in the urban landscape interestingly brings to mind the work of contemporary street artists, such as the famous and anonymous Englishman, Banksy. The process and result of creating an immersive gallery environment rather than simply a framed artwork is a way of making work that is now much more wide spread than it was when Spero developed the notion during the 1980s. The contemporary British artist Jean Thompson practices a very similar technique with equally challenging 'maternal' and 'feminine' themes. More broadly speaking in popular culture, using collage cut and pasted directly on to the wall has become an important statement in the world of design, with both public and private spaces preferring this way to decorate rather than a picture in a frame.