Farewell to Nancy Spero

A couple of days ago, a friend mentioned the fact that the passing of Nancy Spero (Cleveland, 1926) last October was not reported in the Spanish media. He was completely right. It is hard to understand this oversight, particularly if we take into account the fact that the MACBA recently held an exhibition of her work, as did the MNCARS. We were fortunate enough to meet her and to have a chance to express our gratitude for the effort she made to attend the opening of her show in Madrid. The degenerative illness which had ravaged her body for decades had not undermined her capacity for work, her desire to continue creating and her extraordinary intelligence and determination with regard to the ideas she had always defended. Spero was highly committed to political causes, and feminism was one of the mainstays of her work, which led her, in the early 1970s, to become one of the supporters of the first gallery in New York to show art produced by women, which at that point enjoyed very little exposure. Her opposition to the Vietnam War was the focus of her work in the 1970s, while her final works centred on the invasion of Iraq. The extensive retrospective shows held in Spain compensated for the lack of attention paid to this artist here. Although the MACBA and the MNCARS have some of her pieces on display, not many people realise that the drawings she made on the columns of the coffee shop in the Círculo de Bellas Artes, in Madrid, on the occasion of a collective show in which she took part in 1992, are still there, ready to speak to us about the joy we can find in life, in spite of everything.