The Abstractions of Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam, Along, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 284.5 x 366 cm. Purchased 2022. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: NGC
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, a Black baby boy's first breath will be taken in the throes of the Great Depression and the crucible of the Jim Crow-era South. That same year, headlines such as "Negro Is Slain By Texas Posse: Victim's Heart Removed After His Capture By Armed Men" will be too common. Somehow this child would become Sam Gilliam, the godfather of draped paintings, and one of the most influential abstract artists of his generation. Despite this world of colour codes and barriers based on skin, Gilliam would immerse the art world in polychrome and liberate walls from the confines of canvas and paper.
Like jazz standards, there were standards in art, but a stretched canvas couldn’t stretch far enough for Sam Gilliam's œuvre. A wall couldn’t contain his frame of mind. He was the Bebop that would later inspire him. He was high and low tempo, intricate verse and a staccato rhythm that flowed beyond the lines of any sheet music. A Coltrane of abstraction and colour existing as sculpture. Or was it an abstract sculpture existing as colour? For Gilliam, the frame was a cage daring him to break through, and so he did.
In 1961, Gilliam would escape the South after obtaining his Master’s Degree from the University of Louisville. This would lead him to Washington, D.C. – not quite the promised land, but a land with promise. Here he would find his community through loose and close affiliation. That community – the Washington Color School – was a collective of Washington-based artists heavily influenced by abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Colour – and the various means of presenting it as the vehicle for expression – guided their practice, and this suited Gilliam’s desire to push boundaries with his work perfectly. It was here that Gilliam would work and present paintings alongside contemporaries including Hilda Thorpe, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing and Gene Davis and, although he was never considered an official member of the collective, he was a close associate. The Washington Color School’s 1965 group exhibition, Washington Color Painter, at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, would announce a new way of thinking about abstraction and colour: one that pushed the boundaries of lines and form. For instance, in works from that period, such as Along (1969), Gilliam fills a colossal canvas with a nebulous array of explosive chroma. The work, acquired by the National Gallery of Canada in 2022, gives the viewer an impression of depth reminiscent of floating through the cosmos.
Sam Gilliam, Along, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 284.5 x 366 cm. Purchased 2022. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: NGC
By 1969, Gilliam had decided to forget walls and frames and figures. He would make room for his work – draped paintings – by hanging these sculptural, unstretched canvas works from the ceiling. Spring flowers in the South – azaleas, forsythias and leafy greenery – also influenced his colour choices. However, his impact would be felt later than many of his peers, and worse, he was just outside the orbit of Black audiences enthralled with the Black Power movement of that time. The movement sought to amplify the “Black is beautiful” message through overtly artistic expression. This Black Arts Movement (BAM) included poetry and literature, film, dance, and a heightened appetite for African Americans hungry for more overtly positive representation of themselves in visual art. In a 1973 interview with ARTnews, when asked about his position on the concept of Black art, Gilliam responded, “I think there has to be a black art because there is a white art” and “the phrase black art is the best thing that has happened for the condition for black artists in America.” However, in the same interview, he made it clear his view that, although “being Black is a very important point of tension and self-discovery,” he wanted his work to be understood from a universal perspective. This internal conflict, combined with his commitment to a non-figurative practice, placed his work outside the specific standards of BAM and the attention of Black audiences. Even so, his talents were recognized by the art world when, in the group exhibition in the American Pavilion in 1972, Gilliam became the first African-American artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale.
Sam Gilliam, Carousel State, 1968. Acrylic and aluminium powder on canvas, 302.6 × 2149.4 cm. Gift of the artist, in celebration of the Museum's 150th anniversary, 2018. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Although Gilliam had solo exhibitions in several major galleries until 1991, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 1980s and 1990s brought fewer showings of his work, despite no decline in his prolific output. His first retrospective, in 2005 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, offered Gilliam’s work some spotlight but did not earn him the respect he deserved. As for many Black and women artists of his generation, the 2000s saw renewed interest in his work. It’s the danger of being an artist too far ahead of your time – you sometimes have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up with your greatness. Some ten years later, Gilliam's work graced the entrance of the Giardini's main pavilion with his work Yves Klein Blue, a sweeping triple-looped drape incorporating elements of blue, red, yellow and white that announced his return to the Venice Biennale. By the time of Gilliam’s solo exhibition The Music of Colour at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018, a retrospective of his early work between 1967 and 1973, the art world had finally become familiar enough with his work to acknowledge its wide breadth.
As the godfather of draping canvases, Gilliam could have easily kept doing these works until the end. Instead, his last, two-venue solo exhibition, The Last Five Years, included his final series of work: heavy acrylic paintings on thick spherical wood panels – tondos – in custom-made aluminum frames. In Something is Going On! (2021), viscous layers of bright paint incorporate sawdust, copper and metal fragments, demonstrating Gilliam’s commitment to hybrid experimentation. In the studio, Gilliam was known to have his assistants press the wood panels into globs of paint left on the floor, before flipping them over and working with what was left. Metal rakes were moved across the panels, etching patterns and cutting deep grooves into paint.
Sam Gilliam, Something is Going On!, 2021. Acrylic and mixed media on panel in bevelled frame, 152.4 × 152.4 × 10.2 cm. Exhibited in Sam Gilliam: Full Circle at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, May–September 2022. Private collection. © Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: Ron Blunt
A lesser-known practice of Gilliam's was watercolour paintings, for which he employed a folded, crumpled technique that gives the washi paper canvas an effect reminiscent of his draping canvases. The elevated tie-dye colouring likely predated the draping canvases, or perhaps inspired them. Either way, it is evident that, even when forcing himself into a frame, Gilliam couldn’t help but push the limits in some way. In “A” and the Carpenter II, for example, Gilliam marries paint, a flowing drape and a wooden sawhorse, creating a sculptural installation incorporating polypropylene fabric, wood, and leather string. It evokes the work of a craftsman, literally and figuratively, and is another display of Gilliam’s whimsical mastery over his materials.
Commenting on his approach and practice, Gilliam said in 2011: “There's not a sight, an idea of where the end is. There's just the beginning. Of course, I'd actually say that your ideas come from the art collective, those artists that you've always been interested in and figuring out what they would do in those situations. That's what an artist is anyway. He's just a single member of a collective, the whole generation that went before.” His assertion that an artist was part of a collective of the generation that preceded them can be seen in the work and his praise of younger artists such as Rashid Johnson, Mark Bradford and Ibrahim Mahama, the 2024 winner of the Sam Gilliam Award. What a dynamic legacy he has left for the next generation of artists to follow.
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