The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie: Documenting A New American Master

Join Evan Goodchild and Alexi Worth in conversation moderated by Christopher Thomas Wood. Evan Goodchild is a director, editor, and educator driven by a passion for elevating human stories. He recently directed and edited his debut feature documentary The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie, which is currently playing at select film festivals. The film has won Best Film Audience at Cannes International Film Week Festival and Best Feature Documentary at Boston.Doc festival. Another short film he directed and edited on artists, Nelson Stevens & AfriCOBRA: Art for the People recently screened at the Boston MFA, and was aired at regional PBS and NPR stations. Find out more about the documentary at: https://www.gregorygillespiefilm.com Evan studied film and audio at Emerson College in Boston, teaches media production in both public school, community and university settings, and produces podcasts for Yale University and the sustainability organization Commons. Other awards include Best Short Film at the Mad in America International Film Festival and a Webby nomination for best branded podcast. Hailing from Springfield, MA, Evan now calls Canton, CT home. Christopher Thomas Wood is a writer living in New York. His criticism, fiction and poetry have appeared in The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation and the Whiting Prize-winning website Full Stop, among other publications. He served as writer for the feature art documentary The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie. Alexi Worth is a painter and writer. He has received awards from the Guggenheim and Tiffany Foundations, and is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York. Roberta Smith of the NYT praised Worth’s work as representing the continued vitality of painting, wryly labeling it “Realism With Benefits.” Since the late 1990s, Worth has written about art for The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, and other magazines. In addition, he has written catalog texts for artists such as Carroll Dunham, Jasper Johns, and Jackie Saccoccio. Worth has taught at various MFA programs, including Pratt, MICA, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Yale School of Art. Forum Gallery presents an exhibition featuring four decades of painting by Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000). Gregory Gillespie show was on view at Forum Gallery until November 8th, 2025 The exhibition showcases Gillespie’s complex, psychologically charged paintings, propelled by his visual anarchy and consummate skill. The works in the exhibition span the artist’s career from the 1960s, a formative decade when the young artist studied at the American Academy in Rome supported by a Fulbright grant and three Chester Dale fellowships, to the time when Gillespie burst into the national spotlight with a retrospective exhibition at the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1977, and follows the evolution of Gillespie’s art that was presented in more than forty solo museum and gallery exhibitions in the artist’s lifetime. Shown regularly by the Whitney Museum of American Art, in international exhibitions of American contemporary Art, and celebrated with a second, traveling retrospective organized by the Georgia Museum of Art in 1999, Gregory Gillespie’s art is as unique, fresh and compelling today as it was during his lifetime. Gregory Gillespie will be on view at Forum Gallery through November 8th.