MAY WILSON
Ridiculous Portraits and Snowflakes
29 November through 29 December 2001

Gracie Mansion Gallery is pleased to present our second show of assemblage and collage work by May Wilson.

While living in Maryland, May Wilson studied art through correspondence courses, exhibited locally, and taught art to her female neighbors. At the age of 61, May Wilson left her comfortable country life and marriage to move to New York. Arriving in 1966, she moved to Chelsea where she held court to many of the artists with whom she had corresponded as well as others she met here. One early correspondent was Ray Johnson. May and Ray developed a long and important friendship from 1956 until her death in 1986 – exchanging ideas and fodder for their works.

May had been doing snowflake collages of women taken from Playboy and other magazines but in 1965, the arrival of some men’s magazines from Ray inspired her first male snowflake collages. Mimicking the snowflakes made with her children, she folded the pages into tiny squares, cutting off the corners and creating holes in the image though which you can see another picture. By combining the two images she created a dialogue between them, successfully marrying the foreground to the background. After her arrival in New York, she continued to work on these pieces through 1967.

Once settled here, May started to frequent the Times Square photo booths to take expressive images of herself which she cut out and glued to portraits of women. In this way she insinuated herself onto a wide range of characters from a Matisse model to a Playboy bunny. Through her countenance, she commented on the male gaze.

Of her show in 1990 at the gallery, The New Yorker wrote:

“A startling and disturbing exhibition of work that was created over a twenty-year period by a woman who learned about modern art through correspondence courses and did not start making her assemblages until she neared retirement age. She is a Cornell of sorts, but aggressive and violent where he was restrained and meek. Her pieces consist of such things as discarded mementos shoved into children’s shoes; matted dolls bound with string, rope and gauze; a teacup stuffed with umbrella handles; and a doll strapped tightly to a box, one of her arms left loose Most works are spray-painted a deadly silver, copper, or bronze. A saner hint of humor is revealed in a series of collages in which the artist has glued goofy photo-booth pictures of her face onto postcards of nudie girls and high-art works ranging from a Parthenon metope to a Gauguin native”.
- The New Yorker, December 3, 1990

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 – 6 pm

FOR INFORMATION: Please call Gracie Mansion Gallery
212-645-7656
Fax: 212-462-4111
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.artnet.com/graciemansion.html