The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

Chicago-based artist Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940) has been commissioned for the seventh installment of the Menil Drawing Institute’s ephemeral Wall Drawing Series. Known for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages, Nilsson first came to prominence in 1966, when she and five other recent Art Institute graduates presented the first of a series of provocative group exhibitions under the name Hairy Who.

Born in Chicago in 1940, Gladys Nilsson studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions, including sixteen at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), and two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California). Her work also has been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as: Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence). Nilsson is represented in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Nilsson is a recipient of the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Award.