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Ever Spero

Nancy Spero, "The Hours of the Night II," detail, 2001. Handprinting and printed collage on paper, 11 panels approximately 9 x 22 feet overall. Photo by David Reynolds, © Nancy Spero, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Nancy Spero, "The Hours of the Night II," detail, 2001. Handprinting and printed collage on paper, 11 panels approximately 9 x 22 feet overall. Photo by David Reynolds, © Nancy Spero. Courtesy the Artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Spero’s art was suffused with [a] very human hope, which she saw as being grounded in the intractability of human struggle. Her work was never crudely utopian—as she told me, “utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring.”

Beyond a body of pioneering and exceptional work spanning more than half a century of tumultuous social change, this sense of hope will be her legacy. It was an everyday hope that she lived and breathed, and a hope for today rather than tomorrow…

— Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Ever Spero”

Read the full essay here.

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