Gail Gregg

Gail Gregg, Carnation, encaustic on paper, 15.5" x 15.5", 2003.

Gail Gregg (born 1951) is an American mixed-media artist and journalist based in New York City. Her work includes abstract painting, works on paper and objects, collage, photography and artist books. 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. These intimate and repurposed artworks convey themes involving memory and reflection, transformation, humor, overlooked beauty, and contemporary consumerism and excess. 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.'" She has exhibited at institutions including the Baker Museum, Beach Museum of Art, Mead Art Museum, Missoula Art Museum and Mulvane Art Museum. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The New York Times and Barron's, among other publications.

Early life and journalism Gregg was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. In 1975, she earned an MA in journalism from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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.

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. In New York City, she studied at the School of Visual Arts, National Academy of Fine Arts and New York Academy of Art. 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). In the latter 1990s she began working in encaustic, an age-old, process-oriented painting technique in which hot wax is impregnated with pigment. 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. 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). Gail Gregg, Gilded Gyre Fragment #92, metal leaf on cardboard, 9.5" x 10" x 1.25", 2014–15.

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. 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." She is a member of American Abstract Artists and Professional Women Photographers in New York.

Art writing and other activities Gregg has written for ARTnews since the 1980s, Carroll Dunham, Faith Ringgold and Amy Sillman, and on topics such as life drawing, museum access, art and Alzheimer's treatment among others. She has written catalogue essays on artists including Yoshitaka Amano, Karen Wilberding Diefenbach, Janet Filomeno, Christopher Pelley, Adam Straus and Richard Tsao.

For many years, Gregg served as president of Studio in a School, a non-profit organization that recruits artists to bring visual arts education to public schools and community centers from pre-K to the 12th grade.