Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero

Between 1966 and 1976, American artist Nancy Spero completed some of her most aggressively political work. Made at a time when Spero was a key member of the anti-war and feminist arts-activism that burgeoned in the New York art world during the period, her works demonstrate a violent and bodily rejection of injustice.

Considering the ways in which anti-war and feminist art used emotion as a means to persuade and protest, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Artexamines the history of this crucial decade in American art politics through close attention to Spero’s practice. Situating her work amongst the activism that defined the era, this book examines the ways in which sensation and emotion became political weapons for a generation of artists seeking to oppose patriarchy and war.

Exemplary of the way in which artists were using metaphors of sensation and emotion in their work as part of the anti-Vietnam war and feminist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Spero’s practice acts as a model for representing how politics feels. By exploring Spero’s political engagement anew, this book offer a profound recontextualization of the important contribution that Spero made to Feminist thought, politics and art in the US.

Rachel Warriner is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, UK, where her research focuses on the important contribution of activist collectives to the American feminist art movement during the 1970s. She has published widely on feminist art and poetry.