It’s not more than a few seconds after we meet that the artist Gladys Nilsson, 86, insists on helping me carry my suitcase over the threshold and into her home. Nilsson has lived in a handsome brick house with Craftsman-style interiors in the town of Wilmette, just north of Chicago, since 1976 with her husband, the artist Jim Nutt, 87. The two met in 1960 when they were both students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
There is art everywhere—paintings and sculptures and masks, piles of papers and books, work made by the two of them or their friends, plus plenty of souvenirs from their decades of travel. “Stuff gets put down and it stays there and we ignore it,” Nilsson deadpans. Eclecticism suits them.
Nilsson and Nutt rose to fame in the late 1960s as two of the six members of the Hairy Who, a subset of the Chicago Imagists who jointly exhibited their funky, figurative artwork, which ranged in style from cartoonish and whimsical to irreverent and absurd. Though the group only showed together for a few years, their impact on the art world was great. They were seen as the “hot” counterpart to New York’s “cool” Pop movement.
I’ve come to visit Nilsson as she prepares for the largest show of her career: a retrospective, aptly titled “Gleefully Askew” (after a 2019 artwork of the same name), which opens July 19 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, after which it will travel to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin. The show includes more than 100 works made over the last 60 years, including watercolors, acrylic paintings, collages, and drawings. “It’s big,” she tells me, her blue eyes widening.
Gleefully Askew, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 112 in. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy of AWG Art Advisory. Photo courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.
Nilsson’s stylized figures—brightly colored with wonky features and proportions, an atmosphere of merry chaos all around them—are the constants in all her work. She places them in situations that might seem mundane at first blush, perhaps a product of Nilsson’s fascination with everyday people-watching. But she infuses these scenes with micro-dramas. Her figures cavort, canoodle, frolic, make mischief.
While Nilsson doesn’t classify her characters as self-portraits, they are, of course, reflections of the person who made them—her wry humor, her perspective as a woman and a mother—and they have aged as she has. In planning for the Crocker show, “I was interested in looking at [the span of my work] because of how I’m using myself as a reference point for how the figures look, how the women have changed over the years,” Nilsson says. Where they were once sprightly, they now droop and sag a little.
