SAM GILLIAM

Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022) was an American abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator. Born in Mississippi, and raised in Kentucky, Gilliam spent his entire adult life in Washington, D.C., considered as the "dean" of the city's arts community.

Sam Gilliam Jr. was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on November 30, 1933. The family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942. Throughout his middle and high school education he participated in school-sponsored specialized art programs. He attended Central High School in Louisville, graduating in 1951. After high school, Gilliam attended the University of Louisville and received his B.A. in painting in 1955 as a member of the second admitted class of black undergraduate students. He returned to the University of Louisville in 1958 and received his M.A. in painting in 1961, studying under Charles Crodel.

Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Gilliam moved beyond the group's core aesthetics of flat fields of color in the mid-60s by introducing both process and sculptural elements to his paintings.
Gilliam became best known for his Drape paintings, first developed in the late 60s and exhibited internationally. These works comprise unstretched paint-stained canvases or industrial fabric without stretcher bars that he suspended, draped, or arranged on gallery floors and outdoor spaces. This contributed to collapsing the space between painting and sculpture and influenced the development of installation art.

Other well-known series of works include his early Slice paintings begun in the mid-1960s, often displayed with custom beveled stretcher bars that make the paintings protrude from the wall. In 1969 Gilliam presented his Slice paintings in the group exhibition X to the Fourth Power, alongside work by William T. Williams, Mel Edwards, and Stephan Kelsey, at the newly established Studio Museum in Harlem. His Black Paintings from the late 1970s were created with thick layers of black impasto over collaged forms.

In November 1971, he staged a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, his first solo museum show in New York. Gilliam became the first African American artist to represent the United States in an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1972. Although he would arguably experience a lull in his career in the 1980s and 90s, Gilliam created a series of monumental painted sculptures at this time for public commissions. Starting in the mid-2000s, his work began to see renewed national and international attention, and his contributions to contemporary art were reevaluated in several publications and exhibitions. His work has since been described as lyrical abstraction.

Late-career milestones included creating a work for permanent display in the lobby of the then-newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, and exhibiting for a second time at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

A delayed full-career retrospective eventually opened in 2022 at the Hirshorn Museum, where he debuted a series of tondo paintings. Speaking in the run-up to the show, Gilliam called it "a real beautiful ending;" the exhibition opened one month before Gilliam's death and was his final show during his lifetime.