A Romp with Gladys Nilsson

 But within days, I found myself stepping into a dream gig: painting alongside Gladys herself.

The mural, Caked: a plein air romp with bakery goods, was created with Gladys’s 85th birthday in mind and is as joyful and animated as its creator. It’s a playful tribute to her signature style, filled with romping characters, swirling colors, and cheeky nods to her favorite dessert: carrot cake.

A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a beloved faculty member for over 30 years, Gladys Nilsson has been a cornerstone of the city’s art world for decades. In the 1960s, she was one of six members of the Hairy Who, a group of recent SAIC grads who shook up the local art scene with their wildly imaginative, graphic, and often humorous work. Their legacy helped define Chicago’s underground art movement and left a lasting mark.

Exuberant and richly detailed, Gladys’s own work features fantastical scenes populated by elastic, surreal figures. Best recognized for her watercolors, she builds layered compositions that are humorous, absurd, and brimming with energy—and also reward deep looking.

Two watercolors from the Art Institute collection

Working on Caked gave me a window into her creative process. Gladys didn’t work from a sketch but let the scene evolve instinctively, fueled by momentum. That first day, we started “scumbling,” her term for building the background—a cloudy blue-and-purple haze made with water-soluble pastels and smudged with wet cloth. The scale of the wall made it a full-body activity. My knack for staying within the lines (and reaching the high spots) quickly earned me a promotion to artist assistant.

From then on, I became her extra set of hands. We invented “Mr. Sock,” a long pole outfitted with old socks and duct tape, for scumbling the upper reaches of the wall. Even at the top of our large ladder we couldn’t reach our goal, which made Mr. Sock an invaluable member of the team. He was such a hit that we dressed him up with a bow tie for her birthday celebration, and Gladys took him home.

The Illustrious and pragmatic Mr. Sock

Each day began with a commute update, often about Lake Shore Drive’s sluggishness that morning. We’d sip coffee—hers decaf, mine not—and swap stories before easing back into the rhythm of the mural. We talked a lot about Chicago and neighborhoods, as we both are from here and yet have over 60 years between us, which meant there had been a lot of changing landscapes, thus a lot to discuss. Upon our discovery of a shared sweet tooth, we began a routine of eating sweet treats as rewards for our hard work. When we felt fueled, we would talk through our game plan and get back to work!

We began at the edges and worked inward, bouncing between sketching new characters and shading older ones. The process matched Gladys’s style—organic, playful, and full of surprise. She sketched figures and traced them with a black Posca marker. I followed behind with white paint to clean the edges. When it came to creating colors, we’d come up with them the same way the mural unfolded—with instinct and a dash of playfulness. Gladys would give me an idea and trust me to mix the right hue. Once I got the OK, I would fill the outlined characters with the colors, and Gladys would go back in with all the details. We used vibrant acrylics, which were more opaque than her usual watercolors, but just as bold.

An organic and playful unfolding

Her characters are instantly recognizable through their delightfully offbeat anatomy, an imaginative distortion she’s refined for more than sixty years. Features are playfully askew: long noses, subtle chins, four-fingered hands—a nod to cartoons—and skin tones that sometimes blend into clothing. I told her she could be a fashion designer. Each figure wears something completely new, completely hers.

The finished scene includes 21 figures in a birthday romp, with five blue-lined floaters drifting gracefully in the sky above.

Ochre trees and ultramarine leaves frame the mural on either side. Among the branches, flexible figures peer curiously down at the action. The center is anchored by a woman in a romper (naturally), surrounded by carrot cake references and lush detail. Though unintentional, it’s hard not to imagine these characters as stand-ins for Gladys, her husband, and her son. The central trio, in particular, seems to resemble them.

To the left of the trio, a floating couple outlined in blue appears to drift through life like a pair of wandering souls … reminiscent of Gladys and her husband perhaps.

One of my favorite characters is a pink-haired, green-skinned woman in a hot pink one-shoulder tank. She’s holding a carrot cupcake—with help from the foot of an infatuated man beside her—but her expression is less jubilant than those around her. Maybe that’s because she has no mouth to eat her carrot cupcake. She once did, but after noticing something in her eyes, we decided to remove it. It felt right. It also became a quiet experiment: would anyone notice?

Speaking of “if anyone would notice,” Gladys hid her initials—gn ’25—within the green lush to the left of pink-haired lady.

The longer you look—especially upward into the sky—the more the scumbled background seems to take flight. The swirls become ghostlike figures dancing above the scene. At the bottom, a few loose lines suggest a window or hole in the wall, transforming the café into a plein air setting. Museum guests now gather below, some with the café’s limited-edition Gladys Carrot Cupcake in hand, completing the frolic and bringing the mural to life.

Gladys and I had so much fun together, and somewhere along the way, a real friendship began to take shape. I feel lucky to have spent these weeks in the orbit of an artist whose career has been defined by boundless energy and a refusal to take art, or life, too seriously. With Caked, Gladys invites us all to join the romp.

—Megann Lawlor, 2024–25 McMullan Arts Leadership Intern, Modern and Contemporary Art

You can visit Glady’s mural in gallery 286, right beside the Modern Bar on the second level of the Modern Wing. And grab a cupcake while you’re at it.

Topics

• People
• Artists
• Contemporary Art
• Arts of America
• Chicago