The Glowing Effect: Garland Eliason-French

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is dispatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

Artist Garland Eliason-French (1942–1996) developed a corpus of figurative symbols that ranged in origin from personal to universal. In a shifting psychological landscape, she was aware of and in constant negotiation with roles that at times conflicted: artist, feminist, wife, mother, and later, chronically ill person. The artist’s use of polysemic, fluid symbols to express the slippery and expansive experience of these multiple roles was a trailblazing feminist strategy for visual storytelling. Through decades of painting and writing, she returned to, re-presented, and reassembled these symbols, drawn from pop culture, daily life, and nature—in particular, marine and feminine figures. She depicted her subjects, which spanned inspirational figures like Virginia Woolf (her favorite writer) to fern fronds, within meticulously layered color fields. As a result, Eliason-French’s scenes appear simultaneously of this world and otherworldly.
        

Seeking further education, French enrolled in the MFA Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1965. Her transcripts include studio classes such as lithography, serigraphy, and figure painting, as well as drawing and painting. Much of her work during this time depicted mythological, spiritual, and historical themes from cultures around the globe that she encountered in courses such as A Survey of Art History, Ancient and Classic Art, Contemporary Art History, Medieval Art, Mexican Art, and Primitive Art.⁵
        She took meticulous notes in class, and sometimes annotated them with her opinions and drawings. Her graduate school notebooks are in the Visual AIDS Archive, and offer valuable snapshots of art historical syllabi and perspectives from this era. At the top of the first page of her notebook for Primitive Art, she wrote: “The concept and term Primitive Art = embarrassing.” Taught by renowned artist and art historian Whitney Halstead, the course included in-depth information about global cultural practices. He placed an emphasis on understanding the cultural functions and historic contexts of artworks and objects, which were at the time, and prior, labeled by Western academics under the umbrella of “primitive.” Eliason incorporated spiritual and cultural figures from Halstead’s syllabus in artworks such as her print Quetzalcoatl y Xipe Totec (c. 1966), titled after two of the most powerful creator gods from Aztec mythology. [Fig. 3]

Alongside learning about and rendering spiritual and cultural elements from her studies, she developed a personal corpus of symbols and influences. In 1967, Eliason graduated from SAIC, and her work was shown as part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 62nd Annual Exhibition alongside work by her fellow MFA students including Christina Ramberg and Sister Barbara Rossi. In a 2015 interview, Rossi recalled: “Whitney [Halstead] and Ray [Yoshida] were certainly the teachers who conveyed how important it was to have more than one idea of art. Whitney would show all kinds of slides in class, many of which he made himself, and he let us know what we were looking at, but he never told us what to think.”⁶ At this moment, artist groups like The Hairy Who, The Non Plussed Some, and The False Image were beginning to exhibit locally at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.⁷ While these groups’ members, such as Art Green, Gladyss Nillson, Suellen Rocca, Ramberg, Rossi, and Karl Wirsum, had diverse formal and conceptual approaches, they shared the alma mater of SAIC and the influence of keystone professors Halstead and Yoshida. Many of these artists would later be known as the Chicago Imagists, a term coined by art historian Franz Schulze to describe figurative artists working across media in the 1960s who engaged with a range of cultural influences including storefronts, encyclopedic museum collections, advertisements, and comic books.⁸ 
        While the majority of the Chicago Imagists did not identify as feminists, they did come from an academic background that urged the awareness and valuation of cultural influences beyond the mainstream art canon. Feminist art historian Cécile Whiting writes that SAIC professors during this era “exposed [students] to a range of visual practices including Surrealism, the figurative art tradition in Chicago, and Outsider art, and inspired them to visit the collections not just at the Art Institute of Chicago but also at the Field Museum.”⁹ Eliason embraced a wide range of influences at this time, including spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic practices that diverged greatly from her upbringing in Peoria. 
        Eliason’s first job after graduate school was at a psychiatric hospital in Dutchess County, New York where she provided artistic educational resources and guidance to patients. Her dedication and interest in the psychology of artists extended throughout her life. She found inspiration and commonality with artists such as Virginia Woolf, Vincent van Gogh, and Séraphine de Senlis, each of whom nurtured a creative practice alongside managing and struggling with mental illness.¹⁰ In 1968, she married Bill French and moved to New York City.¹¹ 

During the late 1960s, Eliason-French experienced the onset of serious mental health issues such as depression, particularly following her pregnancy, and continued to struggle with psychological and emotional issues throughout her life. She worked dedicatedly to understand and manage her mental health with psychiatrists and therapists, who guided her to record her daily habits and moods in journals. The Visual AIDS Archive cares for eighty-six journals spanning from July 1974 to June 1995—less than a year before she died. Without these journals, much of Eliason-French’s life and art practice would remain unknown.¹² These sources illustrate her sustained commitment to reading, discussing art, music, and the pursuit of self-knowledge beyond graduate school.

When preparing for the slide-sharing event that would accompany the exhibition, Eliason-French wrote:

I had to get my feminism directly into my work. One aspect of this is to deliberately work with the decorative. Teachers tried to kill off and despised the decorative all the years I was in art school . . . A memory overwhelming everything else in the History of Art of the Byzantine [was the] mosaic patterning in the churches in Ravenna, seen only in slides in a darkened room in 1964, became the inspiration. I discovered in 1975 that the decorative had a feminist meaning to other women artists, I was overjoyed to realize it is part of women’s traditional heritage. 

The works in Eternal Women explored feminist themes, especially in relation to her identity as a mother. For example, Birth (1975) depicts two identical mothers in the middle of the delivery process, floating in an almost-black background.[Fig. 6] In the center of the composition is a cosmos or nucleus, an irregularly shaped circle surrounded by shells—a symbol that Eliason-French consistently used in her paintings—with reddish fluid spilling outward. Below, a series of embryonic forms in varying stages of development are rendered in a style unbeholden to scientific realism. The painting presents fetal development in a dark, cavernous, almost womb-like setting. Rather than an idealized birth scene, which often do not convey or emphasize the transformations that mothers’ bodies experience leading up to delivery, Birth depicts the titular process through the varying stages of maternal evolution and labor as equal to or above the much-cherished moment of when the baby fully joins the world. The illustration of birth in turn emphasises the importance and power of the womb. The forms surrounding the scene include shells, ferns, glowing orbs, and crescent shapes, connecting the creation of a life with nature and the cosmos.

Though inspired by spiritual and emotional impulses, Eliason-French critically analyzed and experimented with a range of techniques to construct her work. She often began her paintings by sketching a grid, using its structure to place and balance figures within a composition. In 1978 she wrote: “One thing I read by a woman critic about grids, which worries me from time to time, is that the response of the eye to a grid is ‘rapid scanning,’ perhaps even anxious scanning I add. The thing about my use of grids is that they always have some central subject to break the scanning to some extent.”¹⁴ Even in moments of doubt or self-questioning, she was aware of the tasks at hand, “one more figure to cut in this week . . .” Her intentional approach to materials and color is evident in this detailed account from a journal entry in 1974:

I was thinking about how these paintings go best with grounds made of 3 or 4 colors mixed together (not one or 2 colors) because the objects are made of broken hues . . . There is more light absorption over a dark [color], and that is what’s needed for the glowing effect I am trying to get. White ground causes a lot of reflection and light transference even with a dark background color over it, and is less effective for what I am doing.¹⁵ 

Eliason-French’s rich, atmospheric backgrounds muddle space and depth to intentionally place forms in a metaphysical or spiritual context. Achieved through carefully painted layers, the “glowing effect” that she describes emerges as subtle haloes around many of her figures, serving as an indicator of their significance and lack of grounding in the material world. 
        “I am an artist who has invented a style. I call it Feminist Decorativism,” Eliason-French wrote to gallerist Edward Thorp in 1981, adding: “The content of my work is the feminist approach to the subjects of wmen [sic], men, landscape and personal dramas. It is Decorativism in that I am working with the decorative element in art to make it transcendent.”¹⁶ Decorativism can be understood as a philosophy of prioritizing pattern, ornamentation, and decoration over form, or, expression over utility. Strategies of ornamentation and subversions of the decorative were increasingly adopted in a variety of capacities by women artists of the 1970s, particularly in New York. Contemporaneous feminist artists such as Joyce Kozloff created work inspired by the histories of arts and craft (such as textiles) made by women, as part of what would go on to be referred to as the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement. Eliason-French was certainly aware of these artists as she was a reader of HERESIES, a feminist art journal co-founded by Kozloff. Art historian and curator Anna Katz writes: 

P&D artists saw themselves as opening their art up and out, letting the world in by way of the decorative. Their work referred to architectural ornamentation, jewelry, fabric design, stained glass, miniatures and manuscriptions, embroidery and other “minor” arts associated with women’s work, textiles, and mosaics . . . P&D understood modernism as a puritanical art of exclusion . . . and sought to create an art based on both aesthetic and political principles of inclusion. ¹⁷

One of Eliason-French’s most intricate paintings, Rebirth for a Moorish Woman (1975) contains several figures at various ages, including in utero. [Fig. 7] In the composition, an embryo, a baby, a toddler, and a young adult man (perhaps her son) are shown alongside women of all ages, including the artist herself, wearing a robe, shrugging in the bottom-right corner. The work’s title refers to the spiritual belief of reincarnation, and beings of all ages are represented on the same visual plane, conveying a muddled and spiritually simultaneous idea of time.¹⁸ The imagery refers to an individual’s experience of aging and the transformation that aging catalyses specifically in the relationships between sons and mothers. In the center of the painting are two bodies swathed completely—save for a single eye each—in white cloth. This character, which the artist refers to as “the Moorish Woman,” appears in multiple paintings by Eliason-French from the mid-1970s. The artist described the subject as, “an oppressed woman from the Middle East…I show her pride and her oppression.”¹⁹ 
        Over decades of creation, Eliason-French consistently returned to specific forms such as seashells, like those framing the bottom edges of Rebirth for a Moorish Woman. She titled certain iconography that she developed, such as “the Goddess,” an illustration used by the artist to seek strength and direction through a difficult situation or emotion. The Goddess was represented through a geometric, column-like form with concave sides. After a series of good omens one day in 1978, including finding a small conch shell, she wrote: “All these signs that come to me are leftover magical thinking that I suffered in breakdowns constantly, an inner world . . . I always had an inner world . . . but it wasn’t as symbolically charged as it is now. It was more the free rather unknown flow of subconsciousness like that which came to me when I was painting."²⁰
        Inconsistent psychological health inarguably affected the content and creation of her artwork. ​From the available records, the most prolific period of her practice was the mid-1970s, but she continued to make work until the early 1990s. In March and April of 1981, Eliason-French created a series of colored pencil and graphite sketches on colored paper, occasionally incorporating collaged textural components. These drawings are less detailed and layered than her paintings. In them her symbols read as iconography or direct visual communications of emotions and psychological states; she labeled each study at the bottom of the composition with titles such as Suicide Study, Old Age, and Study for Schizophrenia. ²¹
        After falling from her apartment window in the early 1980s, Eliason-French was given a blood transfusion at a hospital.²² It was during this medical process that she contracted HIV, prior to the medical understanding of how the virus is transmitted. Following the transfusion, a wound on her elbow did not heal as expected, continuing to trouble her over a long period of time. It was during the treatment of this wound that her contraction of HIV was discovered. Later, osteomyelitis caused vision issues, and her sight continued to deteriorate throughout the remainder of the 1980s and early 1990s, affecting her ability to write, read, and create artworks.²³

The Archive Project was co-founded by Frank Moore and David Hirsh, pillars of queer arts movements and queer history, with the intention of providing professional resources to New York artists living with HIV and AIDS. These resources, which included the creation of slides to document artwork, were offered to help preserve and record the histories of artists who were HIV+. On December 1, 1994, a flyer sent out across New York City alerted artists to the start of the Art Project’s new initiative. The flyer included Hirsh’s home phone number, and among the first ten artists to reach out was Eliason-French.
        Hirsh set up visits with each of the artists to become acquainted with and learn about their work. He visited Eliason-French at her Greenwich Village apartment, which spanned one floor of a townhouse located above the Marshall Chess Club headquarters. Hirsh recalled seeing the players quietly concentrating on chessboards before he went upstairs. In 1994 during one of their meetings, Hirsh asked Eliason-French about her use of seashells in paintings. She answered indirectly without providing a singular meaning or interpretation but emphasized their significance. Reflecting in 2026 on that interaction, Hirsch shared: 

One feeling that comes to the surface for me was that on Manhattan she was surrounded by water, must have gone to beaches, had to have gone past many shop windows in which sea shells were present. I don’t know the specific ideology she would have associated with seashells but I believe it is her primary representation of the sea and the water that surrounded her and she would have been aware of it in a magical way or in a mystical way . . . And I think, as interesting as it would be, how she would have defined the presentation of being around water. She would have wanted the viewer to come to an explanation.²⁴ 

The Archive Project was co-founded by Frank Moore and David Hirsh, pillars of queer arts movements and queer history, with the intention of providing professional resources to New York artists living with HIV and AIDS. These resources, which included the creation of slides to document artwork, were offered to help preserve and record the histories of artists who were HIV+. On December 1, 1994, a flyer sent out across New York City alerted artists to the start of the Art Project’s new initiative. The flyer included Hirsh’s home phone number, and among the first ten artists to reach out was Eliason-French.
        Hirsh set up visits with each of the artists to become acquainted with and learn about their work. He visited Eliason-French at her Greenwich Village apartment, which spanned one floor of a townhouse located above the Marshall Chess Club headquarters. Hirsh recalled seeing the players quietly concentrating on chessboards before he went upstairs. In 1994 during one of their meetings, Hirsh asked Eliason-French about her use of seashells in paintings. She answered indirectly without providing a singular meaning or interpretation but emphasized their significance. Reflecting in 2026 on that interaction, Hirsch shared: 

One feeling that comes to the surface for me was that on Manhattan she was surrounded by water, must have gone to beaches, had to have gone past many shop windows in which sea shells were present. I don’t know the specific ideology she would have associated with seashells but I believe it is her primary representation of the sea and the water that surrounded her and she would have been aware of it in a magical way or in a mystical way . . . And I think, as interesting as it would be, how she would have defined the presentation of being around water. She would have wanted the viewer to come to an explanation.²⁵ 

To celebrate and document the first ten artists who received the Archive Project’s services, Hirsh organized a group photograph to take place at Eliason-French’s apartment because of her frailty due to illness. In the photograph, the eight artists who were able to attend pose on and around a couch, with three of her paintings, including Birth (1975), hanging behind them. She sits in the center, surrounded by fellow artists in her apartment filled with art, patterns, and potted plants. [Fig. 9]
        In March of 1995, she attended the opening for the exhibition The First Ten, co-curated by Ernesto Pujol and Susan Schreiber at PS122 Gallery.²⁶ The exhibition, which focused on work by these initial Archive Project artists,  included two paintings by Eliason-French depicting her treasured literary heroes, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. For the corresponding publication of the Archive Project’s second exhibition, Eliason-French wrote: 

My paintings in the exhibit were done as I discovered Virginia Woolf . . .  She has been a continuous source of inspiration to me in her life and her work. Her surmounting of illness stands like her lighthouse in the face of my own personal difficulties. Her vision has remained with me and rewarded me to the present.”²⁷

As Eliason-French reckoned with magical thinking, visions, and the realities of the day-to-day world, these icons became dependable both in introspection and expression. The symbols populating her work tell a fluid story of Eliason-French’s pursuit of meaning and expression both within and beyond the material world.

Eliason-French passed away at the age of 53, on April 22, 1996, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. She is another consummate case of an artist whose work and practice might not be recorded without the support and resources of Visual AIDS. Beginning with ten artists, the Archive Project has evolved into a vast archive representing over 970 HIV+ artist records that are cared for and made accessible to the public by Visual AIDS.

About the Author

Chava Maeve Krivchenia is a curator and writer. She currently serves as the Assistant Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. Krivchenia earned her MA in Contemporary and Modern Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2020).

This essay was edited by Sophia Larigakis.