Kathleen Gilje with Lowery Sims as Ingres’ Napoleon With a Gun (2006). Courtesy Kathleen Gilje, Photograph by Dana Martin, New York, 2006

Painter Kathleen Gilje’s life has unfolded like a Felliniesque film, where dreams and destiny are inseparable. Born in 1945 and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Gilje grew up in an immigrant family. She was always drawing and painting, but it never occurred to her that painting could be a career. After graduating from City College of New York, her parents gave her a round-trip ticket to Europe. She stayed for more than five years, and Italy changed everything.

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Gilje traveled between Rome and Naples, where she worked as a conservator of paintings. It was there that she fell in love with Old Masters and began to see them almost as “living, breathing things.” She learned how layers expand and contract, how paintings crack, pop and age—almost like a lifespan. This was where she learned, as she later put it, the meat and potatoes of restoration. It was also where she began to explore making her own work. Eventually, she returned to America, rented a loft in SoHo and began painting full time.

Gilje is known for revisiting historical paintings, making contemporary interventions. As the art historian Linda Nochlin wrote in Art in America, she is “as much a conceptual artist as she is a dyed-in-the-wool painter.”

Gilje is also my mother. Her studio was my childhood landscape. Growing up inside an artist’s life long enough, you learn that art is not a job. Art is soul. It’s persistence. It’s an obsession. It’s learning how to stay within something for it to reveal itself. Her work questions the accepted versions of truth and exposes what has been buried or erased. Power and vulnerability coexist in her work. So do beauty and disruption. And so does love. She gave me the framework and the gumption to question the societal stories we inherit and to trust my voice—whether I was writing “The J-Spot” column or speaking out publicly during #MeToo.

Gilje’s work has been shown in museums internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Bruce Museum, the List Center at MIT, the Williams College Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She currently has an exhibition at the Morris Museum, “Iconic: Kathleen Gilje Repaints Art History,” which brings together three decades of her work and is on through April 2026.

Our conversations took place over lunch in the loft where she paints and I write. It’s where we’ve always talked about art, literature, politics and whatever we’re thinking through at the moment.

Have you always loved art even in childhood?

I think I was born with a paintbrush in my hand. That was how I played. All I did was draw. I grew up in an immigrant family and had a fairly conventional upbringing, although my mother was a little unconventional in that she was an avid reader. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t reading. When she took breaks, she wrote poetry, all while raising three children. As a child, when I wanted a book, she didn’t hand me a children’s book. She handed me Omar Khayyam or Balzac, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. At a certain point, she began painting. I remember seeing my mother painting in the kitchen.

Did you ever think you could have a career as a painter?

I went to college and majored in art and literature, but I thought I would have to do something else. I remember taking art history classes and watching slides being projected while the professor talked. The paintings felt distant. What I learned about art came later when I lived in Italy. I had always dreamed of going to Europe. I wanted to get out of the small world I grew up in and see a bigger world.

After I graduated, I traveled through Europe and landed in Rome. I would go to the park, Villa Borghese, and draw the trees, or I would walk around at night and look at the buildings and think, “This is the most amazing place.” It was very different from Brooklyn. Everything was old. You could see where people, for hundreds and hundreds of years, had worn the steps down with their feet. There was such a presence of history—of life, of past and present.

By the fall, I needed a winter coat and I was running out of money. I had to get a job. When I was in college, I worked part-time restoring high-end furniture. Occasionally, paintings would come in, which I’d restore too, but I knew nothing. I faked it. In Rome, a friend told me there was a famous conservator, Antonio De Mata, on Via del Babuino. So I walked there and knocked on these old, gigantic doors. When the professor came out, I said I was looking for a job as a restorer. He was very short, Neapolitan. He asked what experience I had. I looked him straight in the eye and, in my broken, miserable Italian, said, “I was the conservator for the Metropolitan Museum of New York.”

Had you planned on padding your résumé like that?

No, it just came out in the moment. He knew that was ridiculous, but Americans were popular back then, so he said, “Okay. We’ll try.” I started as an apprentice. I did little things at first, like sweeping the floors, and gradually began working on paintings. I was taught how to reline paintings and how to inpaint damaged areas. I learned the whole........

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