The Glowing Effect: Garland Eliason-French

Research Fellow Chava Krivchenia examines the life and work of Garland Eliason-French, one of the first ten artists to join the Visual AIDS Archive Project. Drawing on the artist’s journals and archival materials, Krivchenia traces Eliason-French’s distinctive visual language of feminist, spiritual, and psychological symbols.

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)

At SAIC, she began to paint figurative subject matter on unified color planes or other sparse backgrounds, a strategy she would continue to employ throughout the remainder of her life. The extant paintings and prints from 1965–67, cared for by Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, include pared-down or abstracted landscapes and often feature fantastical or mythological entities (as in Medusa State I and II [both 1966]). It is clear that, as early as her time at SAIC, Eliason depicted her subject matter often devoid of shadows or other literal depictions of depth, and without setting them in realistic landscapes.

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 

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

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, Hirsh 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 

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.

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.²⁵ 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.”²⁶

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.

Images courtesy of Visual AIDS and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art. Special thanks to Christopher Burke Studios for artwork photography.