Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam (November 30, 1933 – June 25, 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., eventually being described as the "dean" of the city's arts community.

Sam Gilliam Jr. was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on November 30, 1933, the seventh of eight children born to Sam Gilliam Sr. and Estery Gilliam.

The Gilliam family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942.

Gilliam said that his father "did everything," working variously as a farmer, janitor, and deacon, in addition to being a hobbyist carpenter; his mother was a school teacher, cared for the large family, and was an active member of the neighborhood sewing group.

At a young age, Gilliam wanted to be a cartoonist and spent most of his time drawing with encouragement from his mother.

As an adult, Gilliam recalled that creativity was an essential part of his home life as a child: "Almost all of my family members used their hands to create ... In this atmosphere of construction, I too began to flourish."

Throughout his middle and high school education he participated in school-sponsored specialized art programs.

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.

Following early experiments in color and form, Gilliam became best known for his Drape paintings, first developed in the late 60s and widely exhibited across the United States and internationally over the following decade.

These works comprise unstretched paint-stained canvases or industrial fabric without stretcher bars that he suspended, draped, or arranged on the ground in galleries and outdoor spaces.

Gilliam has been recognized as the first artist to have "freed the canvas" from the stretcher in this specific way, putting his paintings in conversation with the architecture of their settings.

In contemporary art, this contributed to collapsing the space between painting and sculpture and influenced the development of installation art.

He attended Central High School in Louisville, and graduated in 1951.

In 1954 he was introduced to Dorothy Butler after seeing her on the bus, and the two began dating.

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.

While in school he studied under professors including Eugene Leake, Mary Spencer Nay, and Ulfert Wilke, eventually working as Wilke's studio assistant; Gilliam became interested in Wilke's collection of woodcut prints, African sculpture, and art by Paul Klee.

Wilke helped spark Gilliam's growing interest in German Expressionists like Klee and Emil Nolde, and encouraged him to pursue a similar style.

Gilliam later said that Wilke would often refuse to let him use oil paint in class because "I treated the canvas with too much respect;" Wilke had Gilliam work with watercolors to learn to release some level of control in the painting process and allow for serendipity in the final product, as the medium can spread somewhat uncontrollably when applied.

He staged his first ever solo art exhibition in 1956 at the university, the year following his graduation.

From 1956 to 1958 Gilliam served in the United States Army, stationed in Yokohama.

He returned to the University of Louisville in 1958 and received his M.A. in painting in 1961, studying under Charles Crodel.

Most of Gilliam's art during this period was expressionistic figurative painting bordering on abstraction that art historian Jonathan P. Binstock has described as "typically dark and muddy in tone."

He was inspired in large part during this period by several artists associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and, in particular, Nathan Oliveira, whose work he had been introduced to by Wilke, his undergraduate professor, and by seeing the exhibition 2nd Pacific Coast Biennial, which traveled in 1958 to Louisville's Speed Art Museum.

Gilliam's thesis, inspired by this group of artists working in a mode that embraced chance and accidents, was not well received by his advisor Crodel, who believed it was "too subjective," but Gilliam still viewed Crodel as an important influence in the development of his work.

Gilliam specifically credited Crodel for instilling in him both a respect for the relationship between students and teachers as well as the importance of the study of art history.

While attending graduate school he also befriended painter Kenneth Victor Young.

Gilliam served on the executive board of the local chapter of the NAACP as a youth advisor and helped organize numerous sit-ins, pickets, and protests against segregation, often in conjunction with local Unitarian churches.

He was arrested and jailed on several occasions for non-violent civil disobedience.

Butler earned her master's degree from Columbia while Gilliam remained in Louisville, and he traveled to New York to visit her often, where he also became interested in work by Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

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; his Black Paintings from the late 1970s, which Gilliam created with thick layers of black impasto over collaged forms; and a series of monumental painted metal sculptures, developed beginning in the 1980s and 1990s for several public commissions.

While in Japan he visited Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel prior to its demolition in 1967, learned about the Gutai Art Association, and was introduced to the work of Yves Klein at an exhibition in Tokyo.

Gilliam later said that seeing Klein's work in particular "had an effect on me, and I thought about making art beyond the interiors that it is usually presented in, about making art more in the outside world."

He was honorably discharged from the Army with a rank of specialist 3rd class.

After early critical success, including becoming the first African American artist to represent the United States in an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1972, Gilliam's career saw a period of perceived decline in attention from the art world in the 1980s and 1990s, although he continued to widely exhibit his work and completed numerous large-scale public and private commissions.

While this became his signature style in the eyes of some critics and curators, Gilliam mostly moved on from his Drape paintings after the early 1980s, primarily returning to the form for several commissions and a series of late-career pieces, usually created with new techniques or methods that he was exploring in his other work.

He produced art in a range of styles and materials, exploring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and printmaking.

Starting in the mid-2000s, his work began to see renewed national and international attention, and his contributions to contemporary art were reexamined and 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.