5 & 5 with Howard Trilling
Keeper of Memories: A Celebration of Works by Gerry Trilling is an exhibition working in collaboration with her husband, Howard Trilling, to remember and celebrate Gerry Trilling’s life throughout her career and work as an artist. Studios Inc. Assistant Gallery Manager Jaede Bayala recently sat down with Howard Trilling for a warm conversation about Gerry’s art and the cherished memories he holds of her.
Gerry Trilling was a conceptual artist who presented a personal recounting of the history and assimilation of the American Jewish Diaspora in exquisite deadpan. Her parents escaped the Holocaust, relocating to St. Louis where she grew up in a community of immigrants viewing identity, assimilation, and belonging as linked to home environments and material culture.
While Trilling used a variety of fabrics to mark the passage of time, she was not nostalgic. She embraced our contemporary material culture, itself omnivorous in the extreme. Nothing was off limits in her unsentimental investigation of the passage from greenhorn to assimilation. Materials, patterns, and certain numerical codes were her conceptual signifiers. Her work insists that you, the viewer, reach into your own personal place of memory and association. Trilling’s work is featured in the collections of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Gerry Trilling was an Alumni of the Studios Inc. artist residency program from 2015 to 2017.
Keeper of Memories: A Celebration of Works by Gerry Trilling will be on view August 1st through September 26th. Exhibition hours are Wednesday through Friday, 10 am-4 pm, and Saturday, 12-4 pm.
Q: How did the idea of having a retrospective of Gerry’s work happen?
A: Because she was a past alumni of Studios Inc. I asked Casey, the director, and she said yes to a show. This is the perfect place to show her work as she loved her three years at this great place to work on large pieces.
Q: Could you describe your experience seeing Gerry’s studio practice evolve?
A: She never stayed working with the same medium. She went from being a weaver to a textile artist, then to a painter, and later to a sculptor, before working with multimedia. She also experimented with fabrics on frames before returning to fiber. She had evolved over her 40 years of work, and when I asked her about her work, she said, “It's all the same to me.”
Q: What was a standout moment to you in Gerry’s life as an artist?
A: She was featured in a big show at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL. Then, of course, she had a solo show at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Missouri where she introduced her memory ponds. She also loved her show locally at Habitat, working with owner Robb Gann.
Q: What do you hope viewers gain from this exhibition?
A: I want viewers to know how creative and versatile she was, and how serious she was about her art. She especially loved her three years at Studios Inc. as a resident. She maintained a very strong studio presence.
The works in this exhibition are priced to sell. It is my hope that the community will connect to and collect these works and take a piece of Gerry home with them.
Q: What was your favorite part of how Gerry created her work?
A: She would bring home things, and we’d have a house full of her work. She used to make these little doll figures that I still have. She started as a pre-med student before realizing she wanted to be an artist. At first, her parents didn’t support her, but she stuck with it and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where she earned her BFA in Painting. She was a terrific cook and gardener, even winning baking contests. To her, it was all the same—creating. Gerry would take it upon herself to find ways to fund her studio practice.
You can read more about Gerry Trilling at https://www.gerrytrilling.com
