By admin 
On her 70th birthday, Chicago-based artist Gladys Nilsson decided to give herself a present. In vivid strokes of saffron orange and seafoam green watercolors, Wilson rendered a vibrant portrait of herself plundering birthday cake by the handful as party guests languished around the frame.
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Viewing “BIG BIRTHDAY GLADYS” (2010) is like stumbling into a party in “Alice in Wonderland,” and is one of 115 artworks spanning Nilsson’s 60-year career now on display at the Crocker Museum exhibition, “Gleefully Askew.”
“I thought there would be 70, but there were actually over 80 candles,” said the exhibition curator Francesca Wilmott. “I lost track between 80 and 90, and when I asked Gladys about this, she said, ‘Well, it’s kind of like growing old. Eventually, you just lose track of your age.’”
The exhibition opened on July 19 and will be on display until Nov. 29.
Nilsson’s artistic career started in the 1960s as a student at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she met her husband and fellow-artist Jim Nutt. The two rose to fame as part of the six-member art collective the Hairy Who, part of the Chicago Imagists movement.
It wasn’t until Nilsson moved to Sacramento with her husband and son that she was able to set herself apart from the Hairy Who. During her time in the city, Nilsson and her husband discovered a channel that would air old cartoons such as “Popeye,” and “Olive Oyl” which became big inspirations for her work.
“But at that particular moment in time, seeing ‘Olive Oyl’ could only have happened in Sacramento,” said Nilsson.
There’s much about the exhibition that’s unconventional. Upon entering the gallery there’s a recreation of Nilsson and her husband’s old Sacramento living room complete with a custom-made couch in a retro-geometric design and faded ‘70s wallpaper. Visitors are invited to sit and watch a video of Nilsson painting a work included in the exhibition titled “Crocker Wonderment.”
The rest of the exhibition takes you full-circle through Nilsson’s oeuvre, from her early works like “Gigantica” (1964) to her experiments with acrylic and water-color. The exhibition displays her artistic range in acrylic pieces such as “Adam and Eve after Cranach” (1971), an amoeba-like recreation of Lucas Cranach Elder’s “Adam and Eve” (1530), or the etched black-and-white figure, “Primpted” (2004).
“It’s an indescribable and yet describable. It is just awesome,” Nilsson said of seeing 60 years of work laid out in front of her.
“Throughout the exhibition, you’ll see these surprising returns and unexpected detours, and the flow of the gallery is a circular flow anyway. And so we thought this was a nice way to collapse that timeline,” Wilmott said.
Nilsson’s approach to art is highly practical. She began working in watercolor when she was pregnant to avoid the toxic turpentine in oil paints. Nor did she let knee surgery or the supply-chain shortages from the Covid-19 pandemic hinder her ability to create — instead, she turned to collage.
“Gladys’s personal life and her work cannot be separated when discussed,” Wilmott said.
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For Nilsson, art and the personal are boundaryless — much of her work explores the feminine sphere, touching on subjects that were especially controversial for their time. Her work often features naked women, sagging breasts, and hairy legs.
Images of Nilsson in her youth can be seen throughout the exhibit: photos with her husband are included in archival works during her Hairy Who days, a picture of young Nilsson posing in front of her piece “Gigantica” (1964), her unruly red curls rivaling those of her creation. While designing the exhibit, Wilmott asked Nilsson to recreate the photo.
“I cannot, in my wildest imagination, imagine another artist who would allow me,” Wilmott said. “She was sitting here in the rolling desk-chair, and I was trying to think of an image to put with this text because we have images on all the other text.”
“A lot of artists are not always willing to be playful in that way, but Gladys was game for it,” she said.
For Nilsson, not a lot has changed about her approach to art over the decades.
“It’s not earth shaking. It’s the small things that happen between people and how they relate to one another” she said.
Whether it’s eavesdropping on a couple in public, or admiring a particular shade of fabric in the department store, Nilsson finds inspiration in the everyday. “You think, ‘Ooh, that’s a sumptuous feel. How can I use that?’” she said.
In her free time, she likes to watch what she calls “guilty pleasure” shows, like “Grey’s Anatomy.” Recently, she’s been watching reruns of “Golden Girls,” considered groundbreaking for its portrayal of older women on the dating scene (especially their sex lives), which she finds has aged in an interesting way. “What’s all the hoopla about?” she said of how normal much of what the show portrayed has become.
It might be easy to forget the audacity of shows like the “Golden Girls” or artists like Nilsson who shattered norms. Exhibitions like “Gleefully Askew” remind us those liberties weren’t always taken for granted.
Much of Nilsson’s work broke barriers. But more importantly, art has always been about having fun — and the exhibition is, too.
“There is nothing about it that’s pretentious,” Nilsson said. “It’s just goofy. It’s slightly askew.”
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