Nancy Macko (born 1950) is an American visual artist based in California.Ressler, Susan R. Women Artists of the American West, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003. Retrieved June 19, 2023.Nowlin, Stephen. "Nancy Macko and the Real Bee," KCET Public Media, May 29, 2015.Robinson, Megan D. "The Fragile Bee: Artist Nancy Macko’s Illuminating Installation," The Iowa Source, September 10, 2018. Retrieved June 20, 2023. 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.MacNaughton, Mary Davis. "Memory and Beekeeping in a Tradigital Mode," Art in Print, March–April 2015, p. 42.Waligore, Marilyn. "Digital Photography: Subversion and Enchantment," Photography Quarterly, No. 75, p. 4–9.Kandel, Susan. "Smaller Doses Needed," Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1994. Retrieved June 19, 2023. 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.Tibbits, Ashley. "Nancy Macko: Commissary Arts," Artweek, July–August 2008, p. 21.Kapitanoff, Nancy. "On the Feminine Side," Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1994. Retrieved June 19, 2023.Butler, Connie "Nancy Macko: Envisioning a Feminist Future," Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994–2006, Karin Breuer (et al), Claremont, CA: Scripps College, 2006. Retrieved June 19, 2023. 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.Orenstein, Gloria Feman "The Shamanic Journey of the Bee Priestess," Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994–2006, Karin Breuer (et al), Claremont, CA: Scripps College, 2006. Retrieved June 19, 2023.Christensen, Judith. "Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994–2006," ArtScene, December 2006.Frank, Peter. "Nancy Macko: Hive Society," October 2007.Ressler, Susan and Stephanie Turner. "Photography as Medium for Co-Evolutionary Animal-Human Conversations," Exposure, Society for Photographic Education, Fall 2011, p. 33–42. 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."
Macko has exhibited at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Portland Art Museum and A.I.R. Gallery.Howe, Kathleen Stewart, Carole Ann Klonarides and Stephen Nowlin. The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko at MOAH, San Francisco: Blurb, 2015.A.I.R. Gallery. Liminal Communities: National & International Members Exhibition, Exhibitions. Retrieved June 20, 2023.Row, D.K. "On display: a passion for prints," The Oregonian, December 24, 2006. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. The First Ten Prime Numbers, Suite 2, Nancy Macko, Collection. Retrieved June 20, 2023. LACMA,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Nancy Macko Collections. Retrieved June 20, 2023. and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Nancy Macko Artists. Retrieved June 20, 2023. among others.Brooklyn Museum. Nancy Macko, Feminist Art Base. Retrieved June 19, 2023.
Early life and career Macko was born in Oceanside, New York on Long Island in 1950. She studied art at CUNY Queens College in the mid-1970s, before transferring to the University of Wisconsin–River Falls and receiving a BS in 1977. She continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was influenced by artist Sylvia Lark and earned an MA (1980) and an MFA (1981). During this time, she met feminist artist Judy Chicago and contributed to the making of her well-known work, The Dinner Party, in Santa Monica in 1979.
Macko's early paintings and monotypes were largely formal, minimal investigations of centralized forms—frequently diagrammatic, single trapezoids that transformed across diptych and triptych formats (e.g., the "Threshold Series," 1984) Power, John. "Brushstrokes Abroad," The Barometer, November, 1984.Burkhart, Dorothy. "Show of Four at Montalvo," San Jose Mercury News, June 6, 1984.Liss, Andrea. "New Work by Nancy Macko," California Printmaker, June 1985.Schlesinger, Ellen. "Encore 8," The Sacramento Bee, June 8, 1985. 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.Geer, Suvan. "Downtown," Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1989. Retrieved June 19, 2023. 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.Cilensek, Cynthia. "'Objects of Power' Full of Surprise in Local Exhibit," The Daily Democrat, May 30, 1985.Fowler, Carol. "Boundless exuberance at DVC," Contra Costa Times, October 20, 1985. These more personal, metaphorical paintings exploring belief systems and the unconscious pointed toward her mature work.Weidman, Lisa. "Objects of Power," Suttertown News, May 30, 1985.
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. Critic Gloria Feman Orenstein wrote, Macko's "oeuvre as a whole tells the story of a cosmogenesis, of the rebirth of a lost civilization and its values embedded in the mother-daughter bond … [she] understands how the erasure and denial of our matriarchal history have resulted in our own psychic disturbances, creating a world that is now out of balance." The layering of disparate imagery, forms and media has been intrinsic to Macko's art from her early printmaking and painting through later multidisciplinary installations and digital works, in which she has repurposed her own imagery.Calder, Diane. "Intersections of Art and Science," ArtScene, September 2000, p. 13–4.Brown, Sienna. "Inside and Outside: The Interplay of the Personal, the Political, and the Universal," In Women and Print: A Contemporary View, Claremont, CA: Scripps College, 2014. 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.MacNaughton, Mary Davis. "About Beeing: Nancy Macko's Dance of the Melissae," Glendale, CA: Brand Library and Art Galleries.Heartney, Eleanor. "Changing States and Gorgeous Decay," Decompositions, Woodstock, NY: Cross Contemporary Projects, 2021.
Honeybee-focused projects (1991–2008)
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. She initially engaged with the philosophical implications of honeybees' successful, female-governed social structures, relating them to feminist utopias, matriarchal cultures, and women's community, spirituality and sexuality. She also integrated the orderly central structure of beehives and honeycombs—the hexagon (also the molecular structure of glucose)—which served as an elegant visual metaphor for conveying interdependence. Artweek'''s Jeanne Willette identified transformation as a key theme in this work—of digital information into art, technology into ritual, science into magic, and a primeval female mode of existence into one of contemporary relevance.Willette, Jeanne. "How Sweet It Is," Artweek, February 17, 1994.
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.Jeffrey, Noel. "Digital Artists See Old Barriers Crumble," Micro Publishing News, February 1996, 56–59. 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.
In two multidisciplinary video installations, Macko combined metaphorical, layered imagery and audio experimentation.Klonarides, Carole Ann. "Lore of the Bees: The Video Odyssey of Nancy Macko," The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko at MOAH, San Francisco: Blurb, 2015. Lore of the Bee Priestess (1992–04) was a visual narrative portraying a newly awakened "bee priestess" attempting to recover the ancient power of a now-lost matriarchal culture indoctrinated by bees, which revered female creativity, nature and peace. Presented as a trans-historical odyssey of both social and identity construction, it interwove Macko's characteristic bee imagery, symbolic objects and locations from around the world, and enacted rituals referencing feminine archetypes such as the mother, courtesan, Amazon and psychic. In "Bee Stories" (2006), Macko created a fractured, kaleidoscopic effect, using hexagonal shapes inscribed with bee-related visuals and a soundtrack of ambient nature and stories about bees narrated in foreign languages that merged in a drone-like cacophony. Reviews described it as a gentle immersion in unfamiliar cultures—temporally, back to an ancient lost utopia, and aurally, through its hypnotic soundtrack.Carasso, Roberta. "Multiverse: Artists across the Globe Create Their Own Parallel Universes," Coast, December 2008, p. 204–5..