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“It’s About Time”: At 84, Gladys Nilsson Gets Her First Major Retrospective

Her paintings celebrate life, time and older age, which is rare when done, as here, with such evident delight.

Recently, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento opened “Gladys Nilsson: Gleefully Askew,” the first full-career retrospective of the artist’s work: 60 years of watercolor, collage, drawing and oil painting. In her home studio in Chicago, on a warm and pleasant day, Nilsson, who is 84 and has spent those six decades continuously making work, told Observer, “it’s about time.” In the room where we spoke was a painting by the late Chicago Imagist Christina Ramberg. And there were more treasures in the collection Nilsson says she and her husband, the painter Jim Nutt, fully agree on. Everything they buy, whether art or antique, coexists just as they do.

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Serendipitously, Nilsson lived in Sacramento for nearly a decade while Nutt taught at Sacramento State University. They are the two surviving members of the original Hairy Who? but are also each known for their distinct and individual practices. More notably perhaps, Nilsson does not seem to have existed in the shadow of her husband. Since their time in Sacramento, the Crocker Museum has become home to one of the largest public collections of her work anywhere (followed by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin). To return to Sacramento, particularly in the context of a career retrospective, is a homecoming that took its time.

"Gladys Nilsson: Gleefully Askew" Artist: Gladys Nilsson Venue:........

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