Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Gladys Nilsson

Gladys Nilsson was born in 1940 in Chicago, where she has lived and worked for most of her life. Her artistic ability was recognized early: she won a scholarship to attend lectures and drawing classes at the School of the Art Institute before she reached her teens. In 1958 Nilsson entered SAIC's undergraduate program where she became good friends with art history professor Whitney Halstead. On Halstead's field trips to the Field Museum, Nilsson was particularly influenced by Egyptian art, Australian Aboriginal bark painting, and Indian miniatures. She received her BFA in 1962. At SAIC, Nilsson met fellow student Jim Nutt; they married in 1961. The pair exhibited together in shows coordinated by Chicago artists, such as "Eye on Chicago" (1964) and "Phalanx" (1965), both at IIT. They also taught children's art classes at HPAC. When HPAC's director, Don Baum, asked Nutt for suggestions for exhibitions, Nutt recommended five artists (Nilsson, James Falconer, Art Green, Suellen Rocca, and himself). These five plus one of Baum's choosing (Karl Wirsum) became the Hairy Who, a group who showed together in three separate exhibitions at HPAC in 1966, 1967, and 1968. All SAIC students of former students, these artists were interested in figurative art and popular imagery, including images from comic books and advertising. After winning the prestigious Logan Medal in AIC's 1967 C & V show, Nilsson moved with Nutt and their young son, Claude to Sacramento, California, where Nutt had found a teaching position. They lived there from 1968 to 1976, when they returned to Chicago dissatisfied with life in California.

Nilsson's works are distinctive in their playful mood and watercolor medium, although early on she experimented with acrylic on Plexiglas and silver pencil on paper. Her paintings present her insightful and humorous perspective on familiar subjects form sex and desire to art, television, and shopping; her titles reveal her delight in wordplay, a characteristic she shares with the other Hairy Who artists. Figures and fantastic creatures sometimes too numerous and complexly entwined to count crowd her lyrical compositions. Nilsson's source material spans a wide range, from popular culture (in 1969-70) she produced a series of watercolors loosely based on the TV show "Star Trek") to art history (in 1974 she began a "Bottacelle" series, inspired by seeing Botticelli paintings in Florence in 1972). Whether the references in the work are vernacular or traditional, her themes often address male/female relations. In 1982-83, inspired by Clare Booth Luce's play The Women, for which she also produced a poster, Nilsson created several amusing works showing women in carious stages of life, a series called "Lice Women,' illustrating another frequent topic- women's sexuality.

Nilsson has exhibited extensively over the course of her career. She is represented by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York and has had several one-person shows at each location since 1970. Additional solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1973)l the Portland Visual Arts Center, Oregon (1979); and Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago (1984). Her works have been featured in group exhibitions at MCA (1969, 1972, and 1984), AIC (1976 and 1990), and the Whitney (1969-70 and 1986), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1992).

Biography by Megan H. Mack, from Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995