The Crocker Art Museum is pleased to present Gleefully Askew: A Gladys Nilsson Retrospective, on view from July 19 through November 29, 2026. This landmark exhibition—the first retrospective devoted to Nilsson’s work—celebrates more than six decades of her raucously off-beat paintings, which are at once mischievous, exacting, and profoundly observant. Women tower, teeter, zigzag, and dance across Nilsson’s paintings. Limbs stretch, bodies bulge, and everyday life tips slightly off kilter. In Nilsson’s hands, the ordinary transforms into the delightfully absurd.

“It’s Nilsson’s rare combination of familiarity and surprise—serious craftsmanship paired with riotous play—that defines her extraordinary career,” says exhibition curator Francesca Wilmott. “Just when we think we know Nilsson, she does the unexpected. With gleeful defiance, her work continually tests her own limits, as well as ours.”

Gleefully Askew brings together approximately 115 watercolors, paintings, drawings, and prints drawn from major public and private collections across the United States, representing critical moments from her 60-year career. Unbound by region, medium, or social decorum dictating how women can and should behave, the exhibition foregrounds Nilsson’s fiercely independent and experimental approach—one she first fully embraced while living in Sacramento.

Born in 1940 to a working-class family in Chicago, Nilsson began her career shortly after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1962. While pregnant with her son, she adopted watercolor as her primary medium, a practical choice that allowed her to avoid the toxicity of turpentine used with oil painting. Critics, however, linked watercolor’s delicacy to her gender, labeling Nilsson the most “feminine” member of the Hairy Who—the nonconformist group of Chicago-based artists known for their bawdy humor, unexpected source material, and formally rigorous yet unorthodox approach to painting.

Long celebrated and just as often too narrowly identified as both a “feminine” watercolorist and a “Chicago artist,” Nilsson established herself as an internationally recognized artistic force while living in Sacramento. After relocating with her family in August 1968, she entered a period of significant transformation, experimenting with new media—including acrylic paintings encircled by embroidery-hoop frames—and pushing her figuration in bold new directions. Nilsson has reflected that Sacramento offered her and her husband, fellow Hairy Who artist Jim Nutt, the chance “to step back and reevaluate ourselves . . . focusing on ourselves as individual artists rather than artists in the group.”

Over more than seven years in California, Nilsson produced innovative drawings and paintings that traveled from Sacramento to exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., São Paulo, Mexico City, and beyond. She also began her longstanding relationship with the Crocker Art Museum, participating in solo exhibitions in 1969 and 1996, as well as numerous group exhibitions between 1972 and 2022. Today, with thirty works in its holdings, the Crocker boasts one of the largest public collections of Nilsson’s art in the world. The artist’s work is held in major museum collections—including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago—all of which are lending to the retrospective.

“Nearly sixty years after the Crocker first exhibited Nilsson’s work, the museum is honored to present her long-overdue career retrospective,” says Agustín Arteaga, the Crocker Art Museum’s Mort and Marcy Friedman Director & CEO. “It is our hope that Gleefully Askew affirms Nilsson’s critical importance far beyond Chicago, underscoring the enduring relevance of her incisive, witty, and joyous work.”

Nilsson, who turns eighty-six ahead of her Crocker retrospective, continues to work actively in her studio, creating surprising new artworks that revisit familiar themes with even greater aplomb and mischievousness. As Nilsson notes, “I’m continually thinking about what I’m doing. I have mental notes, a mental file cabinet that’s just filled with things that are yet to be explored.”

Gleefully Askew: A Gladys Nilsson Retrospective debuts one of Nilsson’s most recent paintings, Loded (2025), a diptych made in response to Charles Christian Nahl’s painting Sunday Morning in the Mines (1872), which is in the Crocker’s collection. A new artist’s video, produced and directed by the Sacramento creative studio Direct Message, will be presented in the exhibition’s Reading Room, with furniture generously lent by Scout Living. Organized by the Crocker Art Museum, the retrospective will travel to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art from May 6 through September 26, 2027.

A lushly illustrated, 256-page catalogue accompanies the retrospective, featuring new essays by Jo Applin, Kendall DeBoer, Robert Storr, Cécile Whiting, and exhibition curator Francesca Wilmott, along with artist responses by Suzanne Adan, Mike Henderson, KAWS, Robert Lostutter, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, Jim Nutt, Howardena Pindell, and Christina Quarles.

The exhibition is curated by Francesca Wilmott, PhD.

Major support for Gleefully Askew: A Gladys Nilsson Retrospective is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional support is provided by Mark and Judy Bednar and Scout Living.