Ecofeminist Nancy Macko’s work addresses life’s fundamental questions by photographing the process of the life and death of plants, which serves as a metaphor of our brief existence. Her interest in nature is ecological and activist. Her imagery conveys her social concerns. She uses the natural world to create metaphors and analogies that also reference the circumstances of women. An early incorporation of bee imagery into her work enabled her to make observations about human society: she studied ancient matriarchal societies in order to imagine other ways of living. By drawing our attention to the life of the hive and the bees’ social organization, she is not only educating us about the importance of bees to food production but also presenting an alternative to the way we live suggesting the need for a different way of thinking.
Macko’s work has appeared in more than fifty solo exhibitions, included in over 150 exhibitions nationally and abroad, and resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the RISD Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her mid-career survey show, Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994-2006, was exhibited at the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006-7. Her traveling exhibition, The Fragile Bee, toured to 20 venues throughout the U.S from 2018-2025. In 2024, her most recent body of work, Decompositions, was exhibited at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College and is accompanied by a full color catalog. Macko has also benefited from productive residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Musée de Pont-Aven in Brittany.
A dedicated educator, Nancy Macko has been Professor of Art at Scripps College since 1986. She established the Scripps Digital Art Program in 1990. She has served as chair of the Department of Art, chair of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, and interim chair of the Media Studies Department. Macko held the Mary W. Johnson Professorship in Teaching from 2018-2025.
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From 1979-1990, I utilized painting and printmaking as the primary means to build and develop my work. In 1990, I founded the digital art program at Scripps College. That opportunity led to a decade of explorations in which I merged and integrated traditional ways of working with digital technology.
By the early 2000’s photography, an important but adjunct tool until then, became more central to my work and it was important to present it on its own platform. My involvement with printmaking has been ongoing and you can see the non-digital work in the archive.
