An artist of fearless experimentation and expressiveness, rooted in textiles and a deep sense of family
Gerry Trilling, conceptual artist, passed away in Kansas City, Missouri, Oct. 27, 2024, surrounded by Howard, her devoted husband of 57 years, and her beloved family. She was 79 years old and lived a full, creative and generous life as an artist, daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother and community volunteer.
Gerry was born in St. Louis in 1945, where she grew up with her sister Karen. Their parents, Siegfried and Helene, had escaped the Holocaust from Vienna and built a new life among the Jewish refugee community in St. Louis. Their family garment manufacturing business and its busy factory influenced Gerry’s lifelong interest in textiles, her capacity for handmade, durational work, and a deep sense of family rooted in community and religion.
Her experience as a second-generation immigrant became a foundational theme in her art work. For her, identity, cultural assimilation and community belonging were intimately linked to domestic environments and material culture. Once, in discussing these subjects with this author, Gerry asked me if I remembered my family’s first couch growing up. Of course I could conjure it up in a heartbeat. For her, the sofa, with its color, pattern or texture, was a signifier of a deeply held sensorial memory that she connected to larger visual patterns in culture.
Gerry and Howard raised their family of three children in St. Louis, then moved to Kansas City in 1986. Gerry earned a BFA degree in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. Over her 45-year career as a studio artist, she would explore a wide variety of media, originating with her interest in fiber art, which expanded into painting, sculpture, papermaking, mixed media constructions and eventually crochet.
Gerry was a lifelong learner, world traveler and lover of culture. She studied at Syracuse University and the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 80s she independently studied loom weaving, constructed wearables and papermaking. She then made numerous study trips to Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, investigating silk dyeing and weaving methods. This longtime study of textile patterns and surface design across cultures became the building blocks for her unique brand of abstraction: constructed paintings of textile-based media, often accompanied by her own brief written texts.
Trilling intentionally made art out of domestic materials associated with postwar women’s “handiwork,” skills that included using textiles and fibers in sewing, garment production, quilting, knitting and crochet. With deadpan humor and art historical savvy, she plucked a tension between high and low culture, fine and applied art. I had the privilege of working closely with three of Gerry’s later bodies of work, all of them textural, textual art works of conceptual depth, visually honoring her family’s origin story in America, the history of art itself, and the art community she had woven around her.
Among her accomplishments was being selected for the 2014-15 Kansas City Collection (of which I was collection manager from 2015-2022), a rotating corporate art collection of outstanding Kansas City artists, in which her works circulated and later sold to leading corporations in the area.
One of her large mixed-media constructed paintings, nearly 5 feet by 4 feet, “BL-212 Constantin Brancusi’s Drying Rack” (2012) captured Gerry’s visual potency, droll references to art history and her obsession with the grid. The background of the piece was a busy, multicolor faux wood grain overlaid with the three-dimensional form of a laundry drying rack collaged meticulously together with small squares of multipatterned paper and plastic.
“BL-212” reminded me of Agnes Martin on mushrooms, or perhaps, Duchamp on absinthe? Anyway, it was fun, accessible and optically stimulating work.
Charlotte Street Foundation’s inaugural visiting curator Jamilee Lacy recognized Trilling’s devotion to the grid, her links to 20th-century modernism and the development of abstraction through artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. Lacy also understood her use of unconventional materials to “paint” with paper square collage or “draw” with yarn. Curator and essayist Danny Orendorff wrote that Gerry’s artworks of this period “seem to come alive with visual buzz the longer one spends peering into and beyond their surfaces.”
Following a productive three-year residency at Studios Inc in Kansas City, Trilling shifted her practice to a larger scale with larger ambitions. She was one of four artists, alongside friend and peer, Garry Noland, in the museum exhibition curated by China Marks entitled, “Transformers: Re-contextualizing Our Material Culture” (2016), at the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at the Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida.
Two more expanded bodies of work and solo exhibitions emerged from her residency: “Narrative Atlas” and “Was.Is.Will,” an exhibition curated by Erin Dodson at Kiosk Gallery. The works from that 2017 show in Columbus Park showed Gerry at her minimalist best. Working with joined individual panels of fabric or vinyl on conventional stretchers, she created triptychs out of distinctive, harmonious fields of solid color or textile pattern.
One of Gerry’s favorite trips was to Iceland. She and Howard had visited a quirky house museum in the middle of nowhere. Petra, the eccentric proprietor (and soul sister?) had assembled a weird collection of ballpoint pens and fish skeletons. But among the bric-a-brac was a crazy crocheted rug made of scrap yarn. The idea of having a forgiving medium, like crochet, that could integrate dissimilar pieces into a larger composition stuck with the artist.
Not long after, Gerry evolved her art practice and media yet again, abandoning the grid to everyone’s great surprise and fully embracing the crocheted circle “drawing.” Tapping into social networks of yarn donors, Gerry quickly amassed a vast archive of material imbued with poignant human stories. Gerry’s hands went into overtime, crocheting hundreds of circular wall pieces in a wild variety of colors, sizes, symmetries and textures that she called “Memory Ponds.”
This body of work became her first solo museum exhibition in 2020, “Memory Ponds: Crocheting by the Light of Netflix,” at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri. There she presented more than 150 of these works, celebrating the stories embedded in them, including a room-sized piece that started it all some 16 feet across.
Many of these works, produced at the start of the pandemic, exemplify fearless experimentation and expressiveness, while consciously inclusive of the memories and stories woven into the medium itself. The artist treasured these donated communal contributions as key components of the work.
Gerry continued working with yarn in her final solo exhibition, “All Stories Are True” (2022), at Robert Gann’s Habitat Gallery in Kansas City. Suddenly the crocheted work moved off the wall in curving cylindrical shafts or stems resembling imaginary life forms from a yarn-bombed coral reef. Gerry never stopped growing as a person and artist, seeing patterns, listening to stories, asking questions and working with her hands.
As veterans of the Artist INC. professional development program for artists will attest, there is an obituary writing exercise that never fails to touch the heart. Gerry, one of the earliest participants, wrote in hers, “I am the keeper of memories in the family and I want my family to honor that and want my family to keep the practice. I want to be remembered for the kindness and love I bring as well as the critical recognition I’ve gained.”
Mission accomplished.
