“The worst possible thing that can happen to an artist is that after their death their admirers gather around one version of what that artist was and defend it,” Yale School of Art dean Rob Storr said at yesterday afternoon's public memorial for artist Nancy Spero at Cooper Union. But, he said, such a fate is unlikely to befall Spero, who died at 83 last year — a prediction firmly borne out by the diverse stories shared at the event by supporters and friends of the artist, whose multifaceted body of work (and unusually full life) make her a pivotal figure in the past half century of art history.

The artist’s former assistant Samm Kunce read a letter by pioneering critic and art historian Lucy Lippard that recalled Spero’s revolutionary days, when she helped lead the Women Artists and Revolution (WAR) group in New York. Crediting Spero as “one of the first New York artists to transfer the tenets of the women’s movement into the art world, Lippard remembered the days of “protesting the Whitney Annual, and pretty much everything else that slighted women artists, which was pretty much everything.”

Lippard championed Spero’s tenacity. “If there was a protest, Nancy was there, a skinny, dandelion-headed, pissed-off Amazon.... Nancy proved that you could do it all, and it would be very, very hard.” In 1971, Spero herself had written a letter to Lippard, which read, “The enemies of women’s liberation in the arts will be crushed. Love, Nancy.” Nearly 40 years later, Lippard concluded her eulogy with the echoing exhortation: “Keep on crushing the enemy’s of women’s liberation in the arts.” The audience thundered with applause.

Artist Kiki Smith came to the memorial to present her remembrances of Spero, though due to an unwillingness to read her remarks in public she brought a recorded version, which she played for the crowd. In it, Smith praised the formal bravery of Spero’s art — its willingness to flout conventional standards of taste and style decade after decade, from her hard-won 1960s "Black Paintings" through her epic Antonin Artaud scrolls to her work on the torture of women. Recalling the first time she saw Spero's work, Smith said, “I thought this work had everything against it — it was made by a woman, it was small, it was made on and from paper, it incorporated collage, it was made up of printed images, it was representational, it used figuration and language and color, and it was subversive.” She also brought attention to the amount of time Spero was willing to spend with developing artists. “She was generous with my generation,” Smith explained.

In many ways the equitable gender split of this year's Whitney Biennial is the direct product of the intense battles Spero and her compatriots had to fight for recognition. But the legacy of this period has been constantly reinterpreted. Prestel Publishing editor-in-chief Christopher Lyon, who is preparing a monograph on Spero, remembered her surprise at learning that the term "feminism" was falling out of favor with younger academics and artists in the 1980s. “Feminism isn’t big enough,” Lyon remembered Spero saying as she sought to understand the rising generation's objection to the term. But the artist vehemently disagreed: “To me, feminism is one of the most radical agendas that there is. For me, feminism means the analysis of the world the way it is.”

This position kept Spero focused, according to many of the memorialists. Hans Ulrich Obrist, in an address read by art historian Molly Nesbit (the globetrotting curator had been prevented from flying in due to the volcanic ash flooding Europe), remembered that Spero once  observed that “Utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring.” Her work was firmly and unapologetically rooted in the tumult and struggle of the world, Obrist said.

Closing the service, Storr told one of his favorite stories about the artist. Having invited her to do a wall painting at an exhibition he was organizing, Storr arrived to find that Francesco Clemente had already claimed Spero's allotted space with a large painting depicting “a series of men interlaced, each one of them with an enormous erection.” Spero, who had an irrepressible comic side, was undeterred. “Nancy looked at this and cracked a smile," Storr said, “and proceeded to surround Francesco’s painting with a series of gaping vaginas.”

In a gesture that Spero would have appreciated, Storr also ended with a call to action. Memorials, he noted, offer a chance to remember and reflect, but they should also inspire further activity. People that have “only fleetingly thought about” Spero, he hoped, may realize that “they have missed something important, and they should begin to dig in.”