Sam Gilliam (1933-2022)

Gilliam, at the Pace Gallery. Photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams for The New Yorker

Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1933. Shortly after his birth, the family (Gilliam was one of eight children) moved to Louisville, KY, where he was raised.  Gilliam attended the University of Louisville, earning a BFA in 1955. That same year, his first solo exhibition was held at the university.  He went on to serve in the Army and, upon his return, began working towards his MFA.

After graduation, he taught for a year in the Louisville public schools before moving to Washington, D.C., where he lived for the rest of his life.  Gilliam continued to teach in the Washington public schools, as well as at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Maryland, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, throughout his career.

By the time Gilliam arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1962, the Washington Color School had been established and included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing.  Gilliam met and became friends with Downing.  Soon, his works became large, hard-edged abstractions. His works evolved as he continued to experiment with innovative methods, taping and pouring colors, folding and staining canvases. He created Beveled-edge paintings in which he stretched the canvas on a beveled frame, so that the painting appeared to emerge from the wall on which it was hung.

In 1965, he abandoned the frame and stretcher altogether and began draping and suspending his paint-stained canvases much like hanging laundry on the clothesline.  Each work could be improvised and rearranged at will.  The first of these was displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969.  Gilliam received numerous public and private commissions for his draped canvases. One of the largest of these was Seahorses in 1975.  This six-part work involved several hundred feet of paint-stained canvas installed along the exterior walls of two adjacent wings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  In 1972, he represented the US in the Venice Biennale.

By 1975, Gilliam began creating dynamic geometric collages influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and later produced similar collages in monochromatic black hues. 

Reinvention has been a consistent component in Gilliam’s work throughout his career, and he continued to innovate, disrupt, and improvise until his passing in 2022.