Maypole-War

The collaborator of this work is John C. Erickson. This work comes from the Femfolio, produced at the Brodsky Center. This portfolio is an historic publication bringing together twenty of the women artists who created the feminist revolution in art during the 1970s. A small donation makes a big difference! Would you like to give to the College in honor of a loved one and have their name memorialized here? Contact the Hudson Community College Foundation at (201) 360-4007.

According to a 2023 exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA): "Nancy Spero was an American visual artist known for her sustained engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence, all the while articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and celebratory cycles of life. An outspoken activist against the Vietnam war (1955–1975), Spero made this print in 2007 in reference to the Iraq War (2003–2011), as a study for developing a very large sculptural installation entitled Maypole: Take No Prisoners, which she exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Italy. The drawing is printed as a lithograph on Kozo paper. The paper’s translucency amplifies the lightness of the bodiless figures, a recurrent theme at the center of Spero’s study of the animated body in movement. A complex network of collective and individual voices is also conjured in her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others".