Nancy Spero made pictures that read like long sentences. From the early 1970s on, much of her work took the form of paper panels joined into scrolls many feet long, across which small printed figures run, leap and repeat, interrupted by blocks of typed or stencilled words. There is no single focal point: the eye travels sideways, as it does along a frieze, a film strip or a scrolling web page. This guide covers what to look for in her work, a short outline of dated key works, her printing technique, and how designers can use her ideas in editorial layouts, exhibition graphics and motion work.
A note on images: Spero’s works remain in copyright, and none of the museum records checked for this guide is flagged public domain or CC0. Her works are described here in text only, with the museums that hold or showed them named, and nothing here implies they are free to reuse. For openly licensed material, browse the MGD museum collection of public-domain art.
Who was Nancy Spero?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection record describes her as American, “Cleveland 1926–2009 New York,” and Tate’s artist page gives the same birth and death years. Biographical sources, including the New Britain Museum of American Art and Encyclopedia.com, record that her family moved to Chicago when she was a child and that she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Encyclopedia.com adds that she later studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and the studio of André Lhote.
She was married to the painter Leon Golub, and the two are often discussed together as politically engaged figurative artists. In 1972 she was among the founding members of A.I.R. Gallery in New York, a cooperative run by women artists; the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Women’s Archive both record her role in its founding.
Her generation of feminist artists included Miriam Schapiro, who took a very different route through fabric and pattern; reading the two side by side shows how varied the visual language of 1970s feminist art was.
Key works and career outline
Only works with dates supported by museum or scholarly sources are listed; where sources give slightly different ranges, both are noted.
- War Series (1966–70): small, rapidly made works on paper in gouache and ink, made in response to the Vietnam War. The dating and medium appear in published accounts of her career, including The Collector’s survey of her key works.
- Codex Artaud (early 1970s): a series of scrolls combining her painted and printed images with quotations from the French poet Antonin Artaud. Sources usually date it 1971–72.
- Torture of Women (completed 1976): a long scroll that interweaves printed testimony with images of women; some records date its panels 1974–76.
- Notes in Time on Women (1976–79): a paper scroll described as about 20 inches high and roughly 210 feet long, mixing quotations on women’s history with printed figures. MoMA lists the work with the date 1979.
- Maypole: Take No Prisoners (2007): MoMA describes it as the last major work she completed, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007, made from hand-printed aluminium heads hung on ribbons and chains from a central pole.
- Maypole, from Femfolio (2007): a digital print with hand lithography in a portfolio of works by feminist artists, held by The Met.
MoMA PS1 later mounted a retrospective of her six-decade career, which brought the scrolls back into view for a new audience.
What to look at in a Nancy Spero scroll
- Composition. The format is long and low. Figures are spaced along the length with large areas of bare paper between them, so emptiness becomes a timing device. Clusters speed the eye up; gaps slow it down. Treat the scroll as a timeline rather than a single image.
- Repetition. The same figure often appears several times, printed from one plate in different colours or orientations. Repetition creates rhythm and turns a figure into a recurring character, much as a logo mark returns across a campaign.
- Palette. Spero typically set a few bright printed colours, reds, blues, ochres and black, against the pale ground of the paper. The paper itself is part of the palette, and the restraint keeps long works readable.
- Line. Her figures are drawn with economical outlines and flat fills, closer to a stamp or a stencil than to modelled drawing. That simplicity is what lets them survive repetition at small scale.
- Lettering. Text is set in typewriter-style and stencil-style capitals, sometimes enlarged into bold blocks. Words are spaced and positioned as shapes on the paper, so a quotation can carry as much visual weight as a figure. This is the most directly useful lesson for typographers.
Technique: hand printing, collage and the paper scroll
Spero worked largely on paper rather than canvas. Accounts of her studio describe drawings transferred to metal printing plates, including zinc, which she then inked and printed by hand directly onto paper panels. Because each plate could be reused, a figure could be printed again and again across different works, building a personal library of images. Typed and printed text was added by hand-printing and collage, and the panels were joined edge to edge into scrolls.
The method sits between printmaking and painting: every impression is printed, but no two scrolls are editions. For background on the print processes behind this kind of work, see our guide to lithography, and for an earlier artist who also used printed figures for social and political subjects, our Käthe Kollwitz guide.
For Maypole: Take No Prisoners she reused her own earlier imagery, printing heads onto aluminium cut-outs suspended from ribbons and chains. MoMA and an exhibition listing in Artforum both describe the work as turning the festive maypole into a statement about violence and complicity.
How designers can borrow Nancy Spero’s ideas today
- Design for the scroll. Long-format web pages, carousels, exhibition walls and timelines all reward her approach: set a horizontal rhythm, vary density, and let empty space pace the reading.
- Build a stamp library. Draw a small set of flat, outline-based figures or icons, then repeat, recolour and rotate them across a project. A limited cast of shapes makes a large system feel coherent.
- Treat type as image. Set a quotation in a monospaced or stencil face, enlarge it and place it where a picture would go. Free typewriter and stencil-style fonts on Google Fonts are a good starting point; check terms in our font licensing guide before you ship.
- Keep the ground visible. Use the paper or background colour as an active part of the palette and limit printed colours to three or four.
- Let figures interrupt text. Instead of separating images and captions, let figures overlap or cut into lines of type. It creates tension and pulls readers along.
If you want openly licensed figures to practise with, museum woodcuts and prints flagged public domain are ideal raw material; see our guide to public-domain art for where to find them.
Frequently asked questions
What is Nancy Spero known for?
She is known for long horizontal paper scrolls that combine hand-printed figures with typed and stencilled text, including Codex Artaud (early 1970s) and Notes in Time on Women (1976–79), and for political work such as the War Series made during the Vietnam War.
What technique did Nancy Spero use?
She worked mainly on paper, printing figures by hand from metal plates, adding text by printing and collage, and joining panels into scrolls. Her late Maypole: Take No Prisoners used hand printing on aluminium.
Was Nancy Spero married to Leon Golub?
Yes. She was married to the painter Leon Golub, and both artists made politically engaged figurative work.
Can I use images of Nancy Spero’s work in my designs?
Her works are still in copyright, and the museum records checked here are not flagged public domain. Study her layouts and methods, but make your own figures and type, and use only images you have rights to or that a museum flags public domain or CC0.
