Allison Gildersleeve is a contemporary artist working primarily in oil painting. Her studio practice is based in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives. Gildersleeve’s colourful visual language is layered and deals with memory, place, and domestic life which she paints into compositions that move fluidly between landscape, interior, and abstraction.
Raised in a colonial farmhouse surrounded by woodland in southeastern Connecticut, Gildersleeve developed an early and enduring relationship with the landscapes of rural New England, returning to New England throughout her career as primary source material. Her childhood, which she has described as one of loving neglect and roaming without schedule or boundary, is the quiet origin of a practice preoccupied with the way repeated experience accumulates, shifts, and refuses to settle.
Gildersleeve builds a personal iconography from a sketchbook of ink drawings she maintains as visual shorthand: breakfast tables, bookshelves, pine-edged cabins, back-country roads. These distilled forms migrate to canvas, where they collide across time and register. A moment from last week pressed against one from a decade ago, the monumental and the mundane given equal weight. The result is what she calls a catch-and-throw juggling act: abstract paintings and collages that wrestle openly with entanglement, restlessness, and the particular futility of letting go.
Gildersleeve received the Elaine de Kooning Memorial Fellowship upon completing her MFA at Bard College in 2004, and has since been twice awarded the NYFA Fellowship in Painting, one of the most competitive grants in New York State. Her work was selected by the celebrated painter Joan Snyder for exhibition at the Bowery Gallery in New York, and reviewed in the New York Times by chief critic Roberta Smith. Additional press includes ArtCritical, the Washington Post, and Elephant magazine. In 2025 she presented Here Somewhere, a solo museum exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, her most significant institutional exhibition to date. Gildersleeve's work has been exhibited internationally across the United States, Sweden, and South Korea, and shown at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2025. Her work is held in private collections in the United States and Europe.