Curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel

For more than fifty years, Nancy Spero has been, in her own words, “sticking [her] tongue out at the world” as a “woman silenced, victimized . . . hysterical.” MACBA's retrospective will present these gestures of defiance in some two hundred collages, gouaches, lithographs, and paintings—from Spero's earliest works on paper as an Art Institute of Chicago student in the mid-1950s to her installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners, 2007. Eschewing strict chronology, Manuel J. Borja-Villel's thematic organization should illuminate Spero's decades-long conflation of painting and writing, with an emphasis on her graphic output as a continuous “life project.” A catalogue featuring an interview with Spero and essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hélène Cixous, and Mignon Nixon accompanies the show. Travels to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Oct. 14, 2008–Jan. 5, 2009.

— Rachel Churner