Nancy Macko

Nancy Macko, Meadow, digital output on vinyl, 12' X 36', 2015.

Nancy Macko (born 1950) is an American visual artist based in California. She is known for photography, multimedia and installations that explore relationships between flora and fauna, nature and technology, art and science, and matriarchy and social rebirth. Her work is rooted in 1970s feminist models of artmaking that emphasized cooperation, interconnection and themes typically associated with women, such as fertility, nurturance and protection. She has drawn inspiration from disparate sources, including honeybee society, goddess myths, matriarchal cultures, the feminist utopias of science fiction, and mathematical and scientific investigations of the cosmos. In a 2015 review of Macko's exhibition, "The Fragile Bee," Stephen Nowlin wrote, "In various parts an eco-awareness and empathetic appreciation of nature, a feminist allegory and scientific study of symbiotic networks, Macko's poetic engagement with bees is both activist and passionate, and evocative of how tentacles from the ancient memes reach into our present." Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others.

Early life and career Macko was born in Oceanside, New York on Long Island in 1950. In the pastel-colored "Shifting Cycles" paintings (1986–88), she pieced together panels, fragmented forms and abstract stripes that suggested boundaries, and more evocatively, tall grasses or flames. Her "Objects of Power" series (1985) was a departure, depicting cropped, archetypal and symbolic items (often luck objects, such as a wishbone or horseshoe) emerging out of black backgrounds. These more personal, metaphorical paintings exploring belief systems and the unconscious pointed toward her mature work.

Work and reception Macko's wide-ranging work has often taken the form of a quest for identity (recalling feminist artists like Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson), human interdependence and harmony, that she seeks through the recovery of an archaic, feminine past or in the order and design of nature. Her strategy of weaving together vocabularies from diverse investigations—involving honeybees, the life cycles of women, flowers or organic matter, ancient goddesses, and geometric, mathematical or cosmological forms— visually reinforces a key, enduring ecofeminist theme of interconnectedness.

Honeybee-focused projects (1991–2008) Nancy Macko, The Honeycomb Wall, mixed media, archival digital prints, vinyl signage affixed to 98 hexagonal wooden panels each 11.5" diameter, 14' x 20' approx., 1993-–94. In the early 1990s, Macko began to draw upon honeybee society for her work's content, structure, metaphorical framework and material, which at times included wax, pollen and honey.

Macko's first large installation, Dance of the Melissae (1993, Brand Library & Art Center), presented a multi-sensory cosmology of wall reliefs, found-object sculpture and digital and handmade images employing sound, scent, taste and visuals to convey the feminine potency of nature, bees and regeneration. The installation took the form of an ancient temple that she based on research into matriarchal cultures, women of the Bible and mythology; its elements included: imagery combining queen bees, bee priestesses, abstracted goddesses and the honeycomb form; eleven displays of bee-related objects perched on pedestals (Stations of the Goddess); a hexagonal floor sculpture made of wax and lead; and Honeycomb Wall, 98 panels containing objects, images and text related to honeybees and the geometry, chemistry and history of honey. Her "Feminist Utopias: New Constellations" series (2000–04) depicted a mythological skyscape of beehives, winged angels, tethered astronauts and matristic constellations painted, stamped and stenciled on birchwood panels or prints. In the exhibitions "Interstices: Prime Deserts" (2003), "Hive Universe" (2006–7) and "Hive Moments" (2008), Macko complemented her apian imagery with mathematical perspectives suggesting a universe coherent and comprehensible in terms of systems, yet open to the flux of inner experience and nature.

"Hive Universe" (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery) was Macko's first survey, gathering over sixty images and structures spanning various media and more than a decade's work; it was part of the national Feminist Art Project. Her "Intimate Spaces" series (2005–14) centered on plant life captured with a handheld macro lens that magnified details and emphasized simultaneously occurring dualities of growth and decay (e.g., swelling stamens and shrinking petals) and beauty and fragility. Macko chronicled the arc of her mother's life from youth to cognitive decline through collaged and altered biographical elements (vintage snapshots, handwriting, religious and floral imagery) whose layered abstract quality ultimately gave way to disintegration, fading and a disorder evoking the discomfort, confusion and agitation of dementia.

With the series "Decompositions" (2021), Macko synthesized longtime themes involving change and transformation, natural life cycles, metaphor and reality, through photographs of the contents of her garden compost pile that hovered between abstract, amorphous forms and recognizable organic scraps. A member of the faculty at Scripps College since 1986, she served as chair of the art and art history department from 1998 to 2003, chair of the gender and women's studies department from 2004 to 2011, and established the school's digital art program in 1990. Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Riverside Art Museum and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among other institutions.

She has received grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and artist residencies from the Banff Centre for the Arts, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pont-Aven (France), North Dakota Museum of Art and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others.