NANCY SPERO: CODEX ARTAUD Since the 1960's Nancy Spero has concentrated on social and political themes in her work, producing the War Series between 1966 and 1970, the Codex Artaud in 1971-72, and the Torture of Women in 1974-76. Hewn from the political divide between Abstract Expressionism and figuration that was the epicenter of the American art debate of the 1950's coupled with the pioneering of a female perspective on Western painting, Nancy Spero devised a new form for painting. Blending language, painting, drawing and collage in her Codex Artaud series, Spero found her voice alongside a generation bent on challenging the political forces shaping the world while searching for greater personal meaning. It is not surprising, therefore, that Spero found the writings of French author and poet Antonin Artaud inspirational content for a series of works produced over a two-year period starting in 1971. The Codex Artaud, a body of 32 vertical and horizontal scrolls, presents what Spero calls her "non-sequential narrative" in a flash of cut-and-paste images and words. With this series Spero defined the blueprint for her future, both in the development of her art-making process and in the evolution of her personal and feminist content. As a founding member of the AIR Gallery, a women's cooperative gallery in New York, Spero became an important force using her art to stage both political and personal manifestos that would, in effect, emancipate art and its practitioners from some of the rhetoric that was then defining the playing field. In the catalog essay for this exhibition author Amei Wallach chronicles Spero's extraordinary journey from a painter of labored, abstract paintings-the declared domain of a male dominated art world-to a lyricist of images cut and copied, borrowed and imagined from anywhere and everywhere: Egyptian scarabs and art, records of Nordic life, Leonardo drawings, military memorabilia, tapestries, tabloids, magazines, books, and so on. "She ransacked civilizations for mythological figures and invented her own." states Wallach. And of the Codex Artaud Wallach goes on to say, "The Codex series has the poetic cadences of an oral epic, in which the subtext of a culture is passed from tongue to tongue, generation to generation... The Codex scrolls take their impulse from the moment when a culture visually recorded oral traditions or current events... To view them is to walk among them in time..." This exhibition was organized by the University of Dartmouth, Massachusetts and is available to tour in 2002 and 2003. Please call for fee information. back to top