“Creative people don’t retire,” the radiant Gladys Nilsson giddily exclaims during our leisurely lunch in her eccentric, art-filled Wilmette home. She is adorned with a pin featuring the cartoon character Olive Oyl on a red backdrop; there is also a kinetic Olive Oyl sculpture on the coffee table. Between an extensive art collection and collected miscellany from her life and travels with her husband (fellow artist Jim Nutt), almost every surface in the house—especially the attic studio—lends the eye a bevy of composed curiosities to linger upon. “I like to have stuff to look at while I’m pondering,” she muses.
Nilsson has searching eyes and is always mentally arranging her next composition. Not in a way that preoccupies or distracts her (her presence is warm and attentive), but one that makes it apparent that for her, art and life are seamless. A keen observer, she intentionally builds visual vocabularies via observing people in neutral environments: shopping at the mall (since she no longer drives, she takes the bus to Westfield Old Orchard), taking in the opera, wandering in Chicago’s many civic gardens (looking for “anything and everything that strikes my fancy,” she tells me). “I collect postures, in my mind, when somebody doesn’t think that they’re onstage, so to speak, when they’re slumped or moving in a strange or exaggerated manner,” she told the New York Times in 2020. Back in the studio, she transcribes and transposes these figures on top of each other to create lively figurative compositions full of color and curiosity. She says of these visual sojourns: “I always have a snapshot on my phone of what I left the studio with. Jim can’t understand how I can go to the mall and still think about my painting. But for me, it’s very easy to do.”
This joyful artist is thriving in her 86th year. She skyrocketed onto the scene as a founding member of the Hairy Who alongside five other School of the Art Institute (SAIC) alumni (including Nutt) in their seminal 1966 Hyde Park Art Center show. However, Nilsson’s small scale and medium of choice (watercolor) rendered her practice easily dismissed from the traditional art historical canon, explains Francesca Wilmott, curator of her touring retrospective “Gleefully Askew.” In the exhibition text, she writes that critics “linked watercolor’s delicacy to her gender, labeling Nilsson the most ‘feminine’ member of the Hairy Who—the nonconformist group of Chicago-based artists known for their bawdy humor, unexpected source material, and formally rigorous yet unorthodox approach to painting.”
Nilsson echoes this experience, acknowledging in her NYT interview that watercolor (which she switched to while pregnant for safety) was considered a “minor medium.” Wilmott remedies this “narrow” interpretation of her work and “disentangles” Nilsson from her Hairy Who origins with this ambitious exhibition that opened at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum in July and will tour to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art next year. The curator tells Vogue: “I wanted to assert her as an internationally important artist who can transcend all of these different categories that are often placed upon her work as a watercolorist, or for making purely feminine art. She is challenging and subverting a lot of those notions.”
Women are always at the center of Nilsson’s worlds; men accompany, enliven, assist, pursue, and otherwise worship these fantastic femmes from the recesses. Olive Oyl, Nilsson’s current muse and anatomy reference model, is an endless subject of fascination—both for her “rubberlike” limbs (the influence of which is apparent in Nilsson’s elongated figures) and for the ability to deploy her feminine wiles to manipulate men. Nilsson occasionally dispatches me images she takes of her television, watching her “Saturday morning cartoons,” with casually endearing text updates such as: “took this snap of the tv at the start of a Popeye cartoon . . . features OO, in all her magnificent glory, forever pitting Popeye against Bluto . . . ever the siren . . . G”
Nilsson is also a retired SAIC professor and lifelong art history enthusiast. Retired Museum of Contemporary Art curator and Imagist scholar Lynne Warren recalls: “Gladys had a very sharp memory of everything to do with the Hairy Who; I came to think of her as the historian of the group.” Her unique renderings—called Mannerist for their “bodily strangeness” by critic Walker Mimms—are influenced equally by pop culture (vintage animations, Star Trek) and art history (she frequently invokes the Dutch king of chaos Hieronymus Bosch’s orgiastic The Garden of Earthly Delights). Nilsson revels in collapsing high and low art; camp and classical influences; elements of beauty and horror. These juxtapositions enliven the compositions and inform their production. She is currently working in a hybrid painting/drawing process—a distinction she emphasizes: “They aren’t paintings or drawings, but a combo of both.”
Nilsson doesn’t shy from the monstrous feminine, and she embraces the inevitability of aging. As Wilmott writes, “Nilsson insists that her paintings are not autobiographical but, rather, that her women lead parallel lives to her own. Throughout her career, and especially since the 1990s, she has used aging—its indignities, humor, and absurdity—as artistic material.” These “inadvertent” surrogates remain glamorous and agile while evolving, much like the artist herself.
Born in Chicago as the first-generation child of Swedish immigrants, Nilsson brings a blue-collar work ethic to her artistic practice that has recently manifested in grand experiments in scale: oscillating from intimate works on paper to giant wall drawings. “I’m reinventing myself as I age,” she reflected in the NYT. The midwestern legend calls Chicago “the middle of everywhere,” a city “not as big as some but bigger than most . . . easy to get elsewhere”—in other words, a bucolic environment for an artist in search of inspiration to wander.