{"data":{"id":"29486","type":"artwork","attributes":{"id":29486,"topgoose_id":4231,"portfolio_id":null,"tms_id":29486,"title":"Hours of the Night","display_artist_text":"Nancy Spero","display_date":"1974","accession_number":"2007.25a-k","dimensions":"Overall: 116 1/4 × 298 1/2 × 2 1/8 in. (295.3 × 758.2 × 5.4 cm)","medium":"Relief print and collage with opaque watercolor, and acrylic on joined paper","department":"collection","classification":"Prints","credit_line":"Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee","is_virtual":false,"is_portfolio":false,"portfolio_tms_id":null,"portfolio":"Hours of the Night","edition":"Edition unknown","publication_info":"","description":"\u003cp\u003eNancy Spero, \u003cem\u003eHours of the Night\u003c/em\u003e, 1974. Relief print and collage with opaque watercolor, and acrylic on joined paper, overall: 116 1/4 × 298 1/2 × 2 1/8 in. (295.3 × 758.2 × 5.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2007.25a-k. © Estate of Nancy Spero / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\u003c/p\u003e","object_label":"\u003cp\u003eThe title of Nancy Spero’s expansive collage \u003ci\u003eHours of the Night\u003c/i\u003e derives from the Egyptian \u003ci\u003eBook of the Dead\u003c/i\u003e and refers to the twelve hours that the sun god Ra spent in the underworld. In addition to this mythological source, the work’s referential scope is global (one notation reads “Torture in Vietnam,” another “acid rain”) as well as personal (the phrase “SMOKE LICK,” for example, alludes to a fire in her apartment). Spero was known for her activism, and one of her primary concerns over the course of her long career was to draw attention to suffering, particularly on the part of women, that may have been given short shrift by the mass media. The primacy of text in \u003ci\u003eHours of the Night\u003c/i\u003e aligns the work with Conceptual art, and the artist indeed described its format as a visual manuscript spread flat on the wall. “Reading” the collage is not a straightforward or linear process, however. Spero was interested in both the metaphorical associations and the visual qualities of the written word. Here, she emphasizes the aesthetics and materiality of the text through specific techniques—such as varying the size and appearance of typefaces and hand printing words from wood-block alphabets. \u003ci\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","ai_alt_text":"A series of tall beige vertical panels with small illustrations and scattered text.","alt_text":null,"visual_description":null,"on_view":false,"created_at":"2017-08-30T15:49:41.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-02-06T11:59:44.215-05:00","images":[{"id":108148,"url":"https://whitneymedia.org/assets/artwork/29486/2007_25a-k_cropped.jpg"}]},"relationships":{"artists":{"data":[{"id":"3869","type":"artist"}]}}}}