Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to representational art. Her paintings "set forth a surreal mixture of fantasy and domesticity in a continuous parade of chaotic images." She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.

Gladys Nilsson was born to Swedish immigrant parents. Her father was a factory worker for Sunbeam, and her mother a waitress. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she met her future husband, fellow student Jim Nutt. Nilsson and Nutt married in July 1961, and their son, Claude was born in 1962. Although Nilsson originally painted with oil paints, she switched to watercolors when pregnant in order to avoid the hazards of turpentine.

In 1963 Nilsson and Nutt were introduced to School of the Art Institute of Chicago art history professor Whitney Halstead, who became a teacher, mentor, and friend. He introduced them in turn to Don Baum, exhibition director at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. In 1964 Nilsson and Nutt became youth instructors at the Hyde Park Art Center.

In 1964, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson began to teach children's classes at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. They and James Falconer approached the center's exhibitions director, Don Baum, with the idea of a group show consisting of the three of them and Art Green and Suellen Rocca. Baum agreed, and also suggested they include Karl Wirsum.

The name of the group show, "Hairy Who?", became the name of the group. It was coined by Karl Wirsum as a reference to WFMT art critic Harry Bouras. There were exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969. The 1968 exhibition traveled to the San Francisco Art Institute, and the last show, in 1969, traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1969, the influential Chicago gallery owner Phyllis Kind agreed to represent Nilsson and Jim Nutt. In that same year Nilsson and Nutt moved to Sacramento, California, where he was an assistant professor of art at Sacramento State College.

In 1973, Nilsson was the first Hairy Who member to have a solo show, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Two of her paintings were stolen from the show. In 1974 Nilsson and her family returned to Chicago. They have lived in Wilmette since 1976.

She had a retrospective of her art in the spring of 2010 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago.

Source:
"Gladys Nilsson", Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Nilsson

Painter Gladys Nilsson, born in Chicago, Illinois in 1940, gained recognition in the late 1960s as an artist and founder of "The Hairy Who," the Chicago-based group of Expressionist painters who were responsible for a funky style known as Chicago Imagism.

Nilsson earned her diploma from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962. She is now an adjunct associate professor of painting and drawing there. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Nilsson's work can be described as colorful, generally small in scale expressionist watercolors that depict whimsical figures in intricate arrangements. While her main medium is watercolor, Nilsson also paints in acrylic.

Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Nilsson is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Austria; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

Source:
Les Krantz, American Artists, Illustrated Survey of Leading Contemporary Artists

http://www.adrian.edu/news_&_info/gladysnilsson_fa02.htm
http://www.artic.edu/saic/programs/faculty/facbios2.html#gnilsson

Gladys M. Nilsson, 79, a member of the eccentric Chicago-based group, The Hairy Who, is now enjoying two major solo shows at Garth Greenan Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery.