Gladys Nilsson’s Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance (2024) bisects the broad, trapezoidal gallery of Colby College Museum of Art’s downtown outpost in the small post-industrial town of Waterville, Maine. Encircling all four sides of a thirty-two-foot-long freestanding wall in the center of the gallery, the painting is the eighty-four-year-old artist’s largest work to date. Nilsson renders sinewy figures in pastel hues, pirouetting hand-in-hand as they enact the titular “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme and its accompanying jig. It is one of three works featured in the exhibition “Alive and Kicking,” alongside a newly commissioned mural by Catalina Schliebener Muñoz and an installation from the 1980s by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.
“Alive and Kicking” is on view at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center. Opened in December 2022, the building, which is adjacent to the town hall, also houses a cinema, a performing arts venue, and studio and exhibition space operated by Waterville Creates. The complex is down the street from the headquarters of the Lunder Institute, a branch of the college’s museum devoted to research on American art.
Colby and its alumni are certainly endeavoring to make Waterville the cultural center of Maine. And within this milieu, the visual art program downtown is an access point for Mainers who have perhaps never stepped onto the museum on campus. A sense of humor and playfulness was therefore important to impart with “Alive and Kicking”—and the idiomatic title certainly doesn’t hurt. The exhibition welcomes folks with a swatch of candy-colored elements; both Nilsson and Schliebener Muñoz’s contributions are chromatically liberal, and Lanigan-Schmidt’s installation of 125 shining aluminum lasagna pans offers a material both recognizable and opulent. Viewers ultimately step into what appears to be a playhouse, where, upon further examination, individual artworks touch on the tribulations of navigating identity, relationships, and whatever else life throws at us.
Nilsson’s painting was the result of two weeks of on-site work by the artist. According to the exhibition’s curator, Kendall DeBoer, Nilsson looked to tools from the museum’s many children’s programs in the downtown venue—sidewalk chalk, washable markers, glitter pens—as materials for envisioning how her characteristically playful, layered compositions would take shape. The commission, DeBoer stressed, is temporary; the monumental work will be painted over upon the exhibition’s conclusion in mid-November. This predetermined lifetime likely instigated a certain freedom for Nilsson, who used unfixed matter like chalk and charcoal.
The figures themselves have the exaggerated extremities Nilsson has cultivated over her six-decade career: sharp noses, weak chins, four-fingered hands, and brightly colored skins that at times morph into the collar or cuff of clothing. There is one ostensible main character on each side of the wall. Both are shades of orange that hit the eye more sharply than surrounding blueish individuals. Relations emerge between these personalities in sideways glances and physical contact, and Nilsson doesn’t shy away from suggesting erotic body parts in the various curves jutting from their corporealities. The work welcomes new associations the longer one sits with it, and with all four sides of the wall painted, Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance is more akin to a decorative vessel than an illusionistic painting where a single narrative dominates.
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s commission also veers into multiple dimensions. Animales domésticos (2024) is a floor-to-ceiling mural that wraps around two walls. Schliebener Muñoz grounds the composition in rhombus blocks of pink, purple, and blue that create the illusion of hallways—an optic trick taken from the static backgrounds of mid-century animations. Indeed, characters from three Disney films (One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Oliver and Company, and The Aristocats) appear in configurations of vinyl cut-outs, with their features partially removed or layered on top of one another.
As a background for this activity, the color-blocking proves versatile in the same vein as a stage set. From a purely formal perspective, it alters the already oblique architecture of the gallery (there are no ninety-degree corners) into something more expansive, à la Sol LeWitt.
The modified cartoons—cherubic puppies, kittens, and Cruella de Vil—don’t express a detectable storyline, but, as the Disney juggernaut is wont to do when brought to high art (Llyn Foulkes, Paul McCarthy, among others) they play on the recognizable. Schliebener Muñoz’s interpretation is a dizzying abstraction of the swirling contours of these childhood emblems. As the mind attempts to fill in the lines with memories of these melodramas, the most successful format for the pictures is not a mural but an adjacent whiteboard and a takeaway coloring book, where this play can be enacted.
Mysterium Tremendum, the installation of illustrated lasagna pans by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt from the late 1980s, is the smallest piece in the presentation but requires the most time to view. Each silver tray contains either a picture or a text, numbered 1 to 10, describing a semi-autobiographical day in the life of a young altar boy (referred to as “Willie”) in suburban New Jersey.
In its arc, the tale imparts some ill-fated bullying and self-harm. A particularly harrowing scene shows the youngster cutting himself over a sink. What pulls Willie out of this hole, according to the artist’s epistolic notes, is an encounter with a fellow altar boy named Richie at the public library. This experience suggests to Willie that his peers may share deeper inner lives and makes him feel less alone. The story wraps with the handful of drawings Willie made to give Richie during Mass rehearsal, which are comically endearing renditions of the instructional diagrams from the Catholic catechism.
Lanigan-Schmidt employed that favorite of punk tools, the Xerox machine, to duplicate the illustrations on view. Each xerox is affixed to the back of the pan with the same image appearing three or four times across the 125 scenes. Mylar gels in various colors and textures, the kind used for theater lighting, are overlaid on each drawing, and the artist further distinguishes each illustration with discursive flourishes; a depiction of his New Jersey town is, in one place, covered in the snow and, in another, had its streets transformed into the idyllic canals of Venice.
These multiple renditions of each episode encourage a choose-your-own-adventure approach. The content of the piece seems to match that anomalous format as the artist teeters between the awful and the transcendent. “The blood drops looked like dried rose petals on sparkling white glitter” he writes on text number 7, describing Willie’s blood falling to the snow.
The relational realities of trauma and togetherness can be gleaned from all three works. And while these experiences are universal, it feels erroneous to ignore how each artist’s biography is a force in shaping what they make. Lanigan-Schmidt was a closeted gay teenager in the 1980s, Schliebener Muñoz is nonbinary, and Nilsson is an octogenarian woman. DeBoer’s introductory text states, “Though elements of identity come into play, none of the work is didactic,” and that framing feels right. Being an outsider can take many forms, and it is not necessarily permanent. But the feelings of alienation or belonging are rooted in some place and time, and those conditions are part of understanding the work.
Exhibited together, in an arrangement sans dividers of any kind, there are clear affinities between the three works and the artists’ approach to color (bright) and figuration (whimsical). Like “Ring Around the Rosie,” a game born in response to the terrors of the bubonic plague, levity can be found in each artist’s rendition of the human experience.
“Alive and Kicking” is on view at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art through November 11, 2024.
—Maddie Klett