Starting in Fall 2016, Professor Nancy Macko signed on to become the new Faculty Supervisor for IT-FITS.
Nancy Macko
Professor of Art
Faculty Member since 1986
A member of the faculty at Scripps College since 1986, Professor Nancy Macko, former Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Scripps College from 1998-2003 and chair of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department since 2004, has been Director of the Scripps Digital Art Program since 1990. Originally from New York, she received her undergraduate degree from University of Wisconsin, River Falls and her graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley with a concentration in painting and printmaking. She has been a practicing artist since the early 1980’s and has produced 20 solo exhibitions and participated in over 140 exhibitions. She is currently represented by AIR Gallery in New York.
She has been active in the broader field of the fine arts including museum work and curating, and has held state and national leadership positions in the Women’s Caucus for Art (Northern California Chapter Chair, 1980-81), the California Society of Printmakers (President, 1984-85), the Exhibitions Advisory Committee for LACPS (Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies) (1994-6); the Art Advisory Committee for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1996-8); the National Board of Directors of the College Art Association (1994-8) and ArtTable (2002-6); and the Advisory Board of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art (2003-6). In the summer of 2010, she was an invited participant to the HERS Summer Institute at Bryn Mawr College.
Since the early nineties, Macko has drawn upon images from the honey bee society to explore the relationships between art, science, technology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Today, she combines elements of painting, printmaking, digital media, photography, video, and installation to create a visual language. This combination of media allows her to examine and respond to issues related to eco-feminism, nature, and ancient matriarchal cultures, as well as to explore her interest in mathematics, and prime numbers in particular, in order to make explicit the implicit connections between nature and technology.
Macko’s survey show, Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994-2006, was exhibited at the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006-7 and was accompanied by a full color catalog. This was the most substantive and comprehensive examination of her work to date and included over 60 pieces spanning various media including traditional and digital prints, video, and mixed media works on wood panels. As part of the national Feminist Art Project, Hive Universe was the forerunning exhibition in Los Angeles to recognize the achievements of the feminist art movement.
Her work is in numerous public collections including: Denison Library and the Samella Lewis Collection of Contemporary Art at Scripps College; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; Bell Gallery at Brown University; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art; the New York Public Library; the North Dakota Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art; Gilkey Center for Graphic Art, Portland Art Museum; and the RISD Museum of Art.