Gail Gregg (born 1951) is an American mixed-media artist and journalist based in New York City.Landi, Ann. "Gail Gregg," ARTnews, January 2008, p. 126.DiGiovanna, Rebecca. Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936 – Present, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture, 2018.ARTnews. Gail Gregg, Author. Retrieved February 12, 2025. Her work includes abstract painting, works on paper and objects, collage, photography and artist books.Landi, Ann. "Gail Gregg," ARTnews, January 1999, p. 126–27.McClemont, Doug. "Gail Gregg," ARTnews, December 2010, p. 111.Panero, James. "Gallery Chronicle," The New Criterion, March 2016. She is best known for encaustic paintings and works on paper that transform everyday, ephemeral discards—scavenged shipping cardboard and crate lids, orphaned photo albums or library cards—into enduring works that emphasize a minimalist approach to surface and pattern, subtle aesthetics, and the hand-made.Johnson, Ken. "Anne Connell, Gail Gregg – Bridgewater/Lustberg & Blumenfeld," The New York Times, June 1, 2001. Retrieved February 11, 2025.Korotkin, Joyce. "Gail Gregg and Anne Connell at Bridgewater/Lustberg & Blumenfeld," New York Art World, Summer 2001, p. 16.Rankin, Lissa. Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art with Wax, New York: Watson Guptill, 2010, p. 56–57, 64. Retrieved February 11, 2025. These intimate and repurposed artworks convey themes involving memory and reflection, transformation, humor, overlooked beauty, and contemporary consumerism and excess.Sheets, Hilarie M. "Gail Gregg," ARTnews, October 2001, p. 173.The Register Citizen. "Torrington gallery features 3 artists in new show," September 9, 2015. Retrieved February 12, 2025. ARTnews critic Ann Landi wrote of the latter works, "The[se] constructions ask us to regard the dross surrounding us but Gregg's sensibility is one of gentle irony and understated elegance. Recycling hasn't looked this good since Rauschenberg's 'Cardboards.'"
Gregg's work belongs to the art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Phillips Collection, U.S. Department of State and Whitney Museum.Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gail Gregg, Delicious, Collection. Retrieved February 11, 2025.The Phillips Collection. Gail Gregg, Delicious, Collection. Retrieved February 11, 2025.U.S. Department of State. Gail Gregg, Art in Embassies, Artists. Retrieved February 11, 2025. She has exhibited at institutions including the Baker Museum, Beach Museum of Art, Mead Art Museum, Missoula Art Museum and Mulvane Art Museum.Artis-Naples. "Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936–Present," Baker Museum Exhibitions. Retrieved February 3, 2025.Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art. "Gail Gregg: The Album Series," exhibitions, 2010. Retrieved February 11, 2025.Russell, Gloria. "Artists examine the role of landscape," Sunday Republican, December 14, 2003, p. H2.Missoula Art Museum. "Selections From American Abstract Artists," Exhibits, 2015. Retrieved February 3, 2025.Mulvane Art Museum. "Encaustic paintings by Philip Hershberger and Gail Gregg," Traditional Fine Arts Organization, 2000. Retrieved May 4, 2014. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The New York Times and Barron's, among other publications.Gregg, Gail. "The Persistence of Memories," ARTnews, November 1, 2011. Retrieved February 12, 2025.Gregg, Gail. "Putting Kids First ," The New York Times, April 13, 1986. Retrieved February 12, 2025.Gregg, Gail. "Money talks," The Guardian, June 29, 2005. Retrieved February 12, 2025.
Early life and journalism Gregg was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. Her parents were Ann (née Wehe) and Thomas Merrill Gregg. She studied journalism at Kansas State University, receiving a BA in 1972.Waller, Kathryn. "K-State alum's art show shows sense of loss," Manhattan Mercury, 2010, p. A1–A2. In 1975, she earned an MA in journalism from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Tifft, Susan E. "Scion of the Times (w/Alex S. Jones)," The New Yorker, July 18, 1999. Retrieved February 12, 2025.Columbia University Record. "Ten Journalists Receive Bagehot Fellowships," October 2, 1981. Retrieved February 12, 2025. The same year, she married Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. In 1981, she was awarded a Walter Bagehot Fellowship for economics and business journalism, at Columbia University.American History of Business Journalism. "1975-2012 Knight-Bagehot fellows," Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing Archives. Retrieved February 12, 2025.
After earning her MA, Gregg worked as a weekly newspaper editor and as a reporter for The Associated Press (AP) in Raleigh, NC. She later worked for United Press International (UPI), in London and Washington D.C. In 1979, she moved to the Congressional Quarterly as its chief economics reporter. Gregg had an extensive freelance career, contributing articles to such publications as Barron's, Institutional Investor, Investor's Daily, The New York Times, Time, Venture and Working Woman.Gregg, Gail. "The Angry Accountant: Eli Mason; Throwing the Book at the Big 8," The New York Times, June 22, 1986. Retrieved February 12, 2025.
Art career Gregg shifted her career toward art in the 1980s, by mid-decade limiting her writing to occasional pieces for ARTnews.Karabenick, Julie. "An Interview with Artist Gail Gregg," Geoform, July 2006. In New York City, she studied at the School of Visual Arts, National Academy of Fine Arts and New York Academy of Art. During this period she produced figurative work and oil paintings of suburban scenes at night—primarily silhouettes and blocks of light—that edged toward abstraction.
In the latter 1990s, Gregg turned to abstract paintings rooted in landscape, while earning an MFA at Vermont College in 1998. Solo exhibitions of this work took place at the Bridgewater/Lustberg & Blumenfeld (1998–2001) and Latin Collector (2003) galleries in New York City.Turner, Grady T. "Tony Bechara, Kathryn McAuliffe, and Gail Gregg," ARTnews, September 2001, p. 137. Later solo shows were held at Luise Ross Gallery (2007–16, New York), the Beach Museum of Art (2010, Kansas), Five Points Galley (2015, Connecticut) and Loft Nota Bene (2018, Spain). She also appeared in group shows at A.I.R. Gallery and the Wichita Art Museum, and in surveys such as "Dynamic Intervention" (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 2013), and "Blurring Boundaries: Women of the American Abstract Artists 1936-Present" (South Bend Museum of Art, 2019; Baker Museum, 2021).South Bend Museum of Art. "Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936–Present," Exhibitions. Retrieved February 3, 2025.
Artwork and reception Gregg's art reflects the influence of abstract movements such as minimalism, color field painting and the Pattern and Decoration group, as well as landscape painting.Korotkin, Joyce. "Gail Gregg," M Magazine, June 2001.Lombardi, D. Dominick. "Waxworks," NY Arts Magazine, 2006. Retrieved February 12, 2025. In the latter 1990s she began working in encaustic, an age-old, process-oriented painting technique in which hot wax is impregnated with pigment. Critics note Gregg's encaustic work for its mining of the medium's potential for subtlety, rich color, soft luminous surfaces and tactile appeal.Zimmer, William. "Beckoned by the Frontier, Artists Leave a Trail, Too," The New York Times, November 10, 2002, p. CN14. Retrieved February 11, 2025. Among other qualities, reviewers also note perceptual effects deriving from the paintings' deep surfaces and thickly painted sides, which flirt with illusionism and realism and shift in status between image and object.
Between 1999 and 2005, Gregg exhibited small, emblematic encaustic-on-panel paintings with creamy, mottled surfaces that were compared to birthday cakes or thick ice. Many of these works evolved from sketches she made while airborne over the checkerboard, rural landscapes of the Great Plains, including her native Kansas (e.g., Carnation, 2003). Often titled after small towns, these paintings were characterized by simple geometric (but not hard-edged) patterns, rich atmospheric effects, a gauzy density, and palettes in close tonal ranges that recalled classical colors of Italian landscape painting: russets, olive greens and ochres. In a representative description, critic Lilly Wei wrote that the painting Roza (2000) "suggests a textile pattern, a gameboard, an aerial view, things cultivated, crafted by the human hand, created by the human will and imagination … [and] demonstrates a utopian belief in the sense of order, art's antidote to the chaos and terror of life."Wei, Lilly. "Geometry Reloaded," NY Arts Magazine, May/June 2005. Retrieved February 12, 2025. Alongside her landscape-influenced patterns, Gregg also introduced rhythmic, meditative stripes and grids that referenced Islamic tiles, using local color (e.g., Marrakesh and Fez, 2000).
In subsequent work, Gregg shifted her point of departure from the landscape to the detritus of a contemporary throwaway culture. In the process, she pushed her encaustic paintings toward relief sculpture, employing found industrial forms as supports: cardboard shipping materials, 19th-century loom cards, plastic packaging. In works like Riesling (2005) and Yellowtail (2007), cardboard wine bottle dividers were transformed into motifs recalling abstract Native American totems; in other paintings, loom card patterns yielded whimsical forms that ARTnews likened to a merging of Paul Klee and Mark Rothko. With the brightly colored relief One Way (2006), Gregg transcended modest material—protective cardboard packaging from a radio shipping box—to create one of her most sculptural pieces to date. She continued to work with encaustic and found materials into the early 2010s, often exploiting cardboard found on the street for its corrugated line patterns or leathery quality (e.g., Rosebud and Scored, both 2012).Winiarski Deborah. "Encaustic and the Photographic Image," ProWax Journal, January 1, 2017.DiGiovanna, Rebecca. Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936 – Present, American Abstract Artists, 2018. Retrieved February 11, 2025.
In the "Album" series (2008–10), Gregg channeled her own familial loss into drawings that explored abstraction and the power of visual autobiography by repurposing anonymous family photo albums and scrapbooks found at flea markets and junk shops. She removed the snapshots, leaving life-worn pages with binder holes, intact photo corners and occasional captions—then filled in the negative space left by the photos with graphite or muted shades of pastel that suggested echoes of the absent originals.Mayes, Katie. "K-State Alum's Exhibition, 'Gail Gregg: The Album Series', Coming to Beach Museum of Art", Kansas State University, January 14, 2010. Retrieved May 4, 2014. ARTnews critic Doug McClemont wrote that the austere black, gray or brown grids "were as entrancing as they were melancholic—devoid of actual human presence, yet saturated with mystery" and capable of "excavating universal emotions—the pain of loss, the frustration of gaps in memory—from the layers of history of unseen individuals."