Ann Gillen: Sculpting in Plain Sight

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The ideal of art as a public good has fortified her long career and some 30 commissions around New York.

By Max Lakin

The artist Ann Gillen, who has spent her career creating public sculpture, largely within New York City, lives and works in a SoHo loft as close to the romantic conception of a SoHo artist loft as can be imagined. Expansive and drafty, it has remained largely unchanged since 1973, when Gillen met its departing occupant, the painter Norman Lewis, at a party, and arranged to move in. She lives modestly, ceding much of her space to her work: sculptures spread across the well-worn wood floor, demanding you move around them. A small seating area has been colonized by Gillen’s prints and handmade artist books; a commanding aluminum triptych insinuates itself over the dining table.

Toward the rear, a hand-built display case is neatly lined with hundreds of maquettes, pocket-size configurations of bent, vibrantly colored sheet metal — a museum in miniature representing decades of proposals, some realized, many not. Gillen has had successes. She has completed 30 major public, private and corporate commissions: sculptures for Bellevue and Lincoln hospitals; a permanent installation in CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism; a frieze for the Queens Public Library’s Marathon Parkway branch; for Lincoln Center, “Processions” (1994-1996), a series of gracefully simplified figures painted in the complex’s underground garages and stairwells up to the Metropolitan Opera House. “Flying Red” (1987), an exultant sculpture of torqued cadmium-painted aluminum, still enlivens the sidewalk outside the Brutalist office tower at 909 Third Avenue.

“It’s showbiz,” Gillen says of the constant pitching and salesmanship her practice requires — not just conceptualization and fabrication — which she’s done without the benefit of gallery representation or a dealer. She has heard many Nos, but rejection has done little to dampen her resolve. She remains, at 88, a working artist.

That resilience animates “Toward Civic Art,” at Polina Berlin Gallery, the first solo gallery exhibition of Gillen’s work in 20 years, which presents a neat entry into the philosophical ideal of art as a public good that undergirds her efforts.

Gillen is a total product of the city. Raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn by an art teacher mother and a lawyer-turned-private-investigator father, she attended the Pratt Institute, as her mother had, where she studied industrial design, and later earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 1969. By that time, Gillen had already largely developed her aesthetic grammar: a sense of form that moves freely between figuration and abstraction, organic shapes that could seem to vibrate and that communicated the city’s energies, both in its conscious and subconscious effects.

One of her earliest works, “Le Weekend Relief” (1969), a 36-by-5 foot Masonite frieze, employs repeating forms of tightly coiled figures. Painted in primary colors, its parts function together as a group, or individually, as an idea that speaks to the nature of city life, its capacity to at once thrust us together and atomize us (a cobalt segment is included in the show).

An early influence was Isamu Noguchi’s “News” (1940), a cast stainless steel bas-relief installed above the entrance of 50 Rockefeller Plaza, what was then The Associated Press Building, and which Gillen became enamored with on family excursions. “News” depicts journalists in propulsive motion, clearly legible individual figures, but also a highly abstracted cooperative unit, urging a free press as a pillar of democracy.

“Toward Civic Art,” co-curated by the artist and independent curator Miles Huston, locates that spirit throughout the arc of Gillen’s career. Her work begins with an understanding of public space as communal, vital to the health of a city. As with most aspects of art making, the nature of public art commissions shifted with the influx of money into the art world; where artists of Gillen’s generation had to advocate for the funding of their work, mega-galleries were now able to pay for their artists’ forays into public sculpture, a development that the city’s arts administrators, of course, welcomed, but one in which concerns like Gillen’s were no longer paramount.

“Usually when artists who have gallery practices are given a public commission, they’re scaling something from that practice,” Huston said. “That’s different to Ann, whose subject was this civic sphere. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, here’s an atrium, do something with it.’ For Ann, the atrium meant something, or these plazas meant something.”

Perhaps as a holdover from her dealings with municipal bodies and selection committees, Gillen speaks in practical terms. Her formal approach is practical, too — and what can appear abstract is in fact highly logical. Her forms have a clear relationship to Hellenistic art. “I said, all right, the Greeks were right,” Gillen recalled, laughing. “The purity of three points” — referring to three-point perspective, a basic drawing principle to give form depth — “there’s comfort in that.”

Her art is also deeply informed by the city’s architecture and verticality, and the way the city bends the flow of people into its own shape. It shares the city’s quality of resisting immediate interpretation, revealing its secrets only with sustained looking. A series of woodblock prints sequentially titled “Crowd” first suggest dissipating tributaries, but can also seem to resolve into the delicately gothic arches of Minoru Yamasaki’s original World Trade Center towers. “I realized years later what I was doing was the facades of buildings, distorted, because I rode my bike all over the city,” Gillen said.

Gillen’s work delights in making its construction visible and more beautiful for it: “I had seen all the monuments in Rome, and they had bands of steel all over them — it’s sort of hilarious and no one talks about it. And it’s glorious. So I thought, That’s it. Why not? For example, the Statue of Liberty. Most people think her two feet are holding her up, but there’s a big internal structure. That’s my art. How we’re held to the earth, how we resist falling.”

Gillen is constantly thinking about how a sculpture functions in the public realm. “I’m not confined to a gallery in my mind,” she said. “You want light that shifts, you want to see how it works with people.” Her humanist belief in the social function of art is a fulfillment of what Noguchi envisioned as a “making and ownership of art … beyond personal possession — a common and free experience.” (In a neat bit of New York public art harmony, Gillen often employed Structural Display, the same fabricator that Noguchi used, across the street from his home and studio in Long Island City, Queens.)

Gillen’s most visible sculpture, “Flying Red,” which weighs a ton but retains the breezy feel of a paper crane, is emblematic of how she creates work that is exacting but not prescriptive, a quality the artist and curator Jenni Crain once referred to as a “consistent nerve and simultaneous gentleness.” Crain, a fellow Pratt alumnus who died in 2021, championed Gillen’s work, and in 2018 placed her in conversation with other women artists associated with the school, including Louise Bourgeois, Beverly Pepper and Deborah Willis.

Gillen encountered twinned resistance in a New York enamored with minimalism or still in thrall to the rigid modernist diktats set by the art critic Clement Greenberg, and in an art world that was outright dismissive of women.

“I would get emotional, unfortunately,” Gillen said, “which never works. I said, ‘I thought World War II was to get rid of fascism and here you are telling me that Greenberg has all the answers, which is ridiculous. And why are you obeying?’ ”

Gillen never relented. “I had those teachers, mostly from the Bauhaus, who said, somehow, you have to do work that’s meaningful to you, and just keep doing it. When I work I try to do what I want to do, what I absolutely must do. What is it that I want to do? That’s the question, still to this day.”

Toward Civic Art

Through Jan. 28 at Polina Berlin Gallery, 165 East 64th Street, Manhattan; polinaberlingallery.com.

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