An original and valuable intervention in the fast-growing field of feminist and new art histories, Nancy Spero, Encounters offers a sophisticated interpretation of the work of a highly original and under-represented woman artist. The study proposes a new model of comparatism within the field of visual studies, mirroring and complementing Spero's dialogic manner of working. Spero's encounters with the work of Ana Mendieta, H.D., Isadora Duncan and others are examined.

An original and valuable intervention in the fast-growing field of feminist and new art histories, Nancy Spero, Encounters offers a sophisticated interpretation of the work of a highly original and under-represented woman artist. The study proposes a new model of comparatism within the field of visual studies, mirroring and complementing Spero's dialogic manner of working. Basing her analyses on extensive research and multiple face-to-face interviews with the artist, Joanna Walker examines how a selection of the artists and art forms Spero cited offer significant points of comparison with her work. Walker presents Spero's encounters with the art of Ana Mendieta; with the poetry of the American poet H.D.; with the dance of Isadora Duncan; and, turning the lens back on Spero as subject, with the portraits of the artist by Abe Frajndlich. Also included are transcripts of Walker's interviews with the artist, and a listing of the books contained in Spero's personal library which informed her practice. Not only does this book cast well-deserved light on an artist who spent most of her career on the margins of the mainstream - it reverses genealogies and revises the traditional remit of the art historical monograph through both its structure and content.

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" asked the prominent art historian Linda Nochlin in a provocative 1971 essay. Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.