Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Color Guard

Image not available
Nancy Spero
1926-2009

Color Guard

2001
19 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches (49.5 x 184.2 cm)
Cut-and-pasted handprinted and painted paper and synthetic paint on paper.
2023.71

Gift of the Modern and Contemporary Collectors Committee.

Notes
A feminist and activist, Spero denounced political violence and social injustice in her art. Working mostly on paper, she developed a form of figuration mixing painting, collage, and printmaking. From the mid-1970s on, she focused on female figures, combining images derived from a wide range of cultures. In the present drawing, which has the format of a horizontal scroll, she juxtaposed a Gorgon from the 580 BC Dinos of the Gorgon Painter in the Louvre Museum with a leaping female figure from Australian aboriginal painting and a woman surmounted by a bird and a tree copied from a 16th-c. alchemy manual. Color Guard's bright colors are typical of Spero's later work.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings