Nancy Macko's Art and Inspirations

Nancy Macko has been an active artist since the early 1980s, and works with a variety of mediums including painting, printmaking, phodography, and video. Her early exhibits and installations brought attention to the plight of bees, and later iterations of these works tied honeybees to a concept of femininity and women’s work.  Macko draws on history, mythology, and experiences of others as main influences for her works. Macko’s work is an intersection of feminism, nature, history, and mathematics, that all work to explore and explain the world around us.

Through much of her career, the honeybee served as inspiration, with its connections to matriarchal cultures, art and technology. The Fragile Bee, and Hive Universe are just some examples of shows that focused on the bee. Honeybee societies hold parallels to human society, and the way in which women find community with each other. Macko finds the connection between the utopic beehive to a goal of a feminist utopia where women could find autonomy, independence, and freedom.

In recent years, Macko has focused on photography; particularly with flora using a macro lens. She has followed flora throughout the entire life cycle. Currently in the works is a project on compost, which shows organic matter at the very ending stages of life, as it decomposes only to give new life to future flora. The life cycle is a theme found in this project as well as in Hopes and Dreams: A Visual Memoir, which details the life cycle from a more human perspective. This project was done in response to her mother’s struggle with declining mental health. Macko paired ideas of spirituality with aging and decline, thus commenting on the continuance of spirit no matter the point in life one is at.