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Sam Gilliam, a pioneering abstract painter best known for his lushly colored drape paintings that took his medium to three-dimensionality more fully than any other artist of his generation, died Saturday at his Washington home. He was 88.
His death was announced by the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and the Pace Gallery in New York. The cause was kidney failure.
Mr. Gilliam was twice an anomaly. As a black artist, he was largely ignored by the upper echelons of the art world until the end of his career (although he was the first black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972). And as a black artist devoted to abstraction, he devoted his life to paintings that eschewed the recognizable imagery and overt political messages favored by many of his black peers. Yet his art was in many respects opposed to both painting and political art, as usual.
Mr. Gilliam came of age in the 1960s and 70s, a period of great experimentation in abstract painting at a time of political and social turmoil, amid the Vietnam War and black struggles for civil rights. But in this context, too, he was particularly daring.
A brilliant colourist, he became known for emancipating his paintings from the flat rectilinearity imposed by wooden stretcher frames. Instead, he draped his unstretched abstract canvases from the ceiling in great curves and loops, or pinned them to walls in a gathered manner. In 1973’s ‘A’ and the Carpenter, I’ he stacked a large strip of canvas painted with airy clouds in pink and blue between two wooden sawhorses, bringing an element of manual labor into a work that is elegant, if edgy unfinished, worked. and that, like much of Mr. Gilliam’s work, looked different each time it was installed.
This effort oscillated between painting and sculpture, while his techniques evoked everything from Jackson Pollock’s drips to tie-dye. They pushed the medium well beyond the wall-hanging canvases created by Frank Stella and his followers at the time. Aggressive and lyrical at the same time, they encroached on the viewer’s space and delivered moments of beautiful, flowing color while refusing a single, safe, centered viewpoint. And they challenged the viewer at every turn to decide, “Is that a painting?”
This alone created a sort of visual tumult befitting the works’ troubled times. A painting in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection bears the simple title “10/27/69” and is set against the backdrop of a time of immense protests against the war in Vietnam.
“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political,” Gilliam said in a 2018 interview with José da Silva in The Art Newspaper. “My work is as political as it is formal.”
Mr. Gilliam’s use of unstretched fabric, relating to painting without fully embracing it, influenced artists across several generations, including David Hammons, Jessica Stockholder and Rashid Johnson.
“There’s something incredibly important about Sam’s use of improvisation that continues to influence my generation and beyond,” Mr. Johnson said in a phone interview Monday. “It is capable of transcending race, but not limited to not discussing race. For me he was a beacon.”
Sam Gilliam was missed on November 30, 1933 at Tupelo. born the seventh of eight children. His father, also called Sam, was a farmer; his mother, Estery Gilliam, was a seamstress and housewife. Sam showed an interest in drawing from an early age. When it was pointed out to his mother that he spent a lot of time silently drawing in the dirt, she provided him with paper and cardboard; it meant one less child to keep an eye on. Horses were a popular, almost fanatical subject.
Raised primarily in Louisville, Kentucky, Mr. Gilliam received most of his formal education there, where he attended middle and high schools that had an unusual emphasis on art. He then attended the University of Louisville, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in painting. During these years his determination to be an artist was nurtured by teachers who recognized his talent and drive. He also developed a love of jazz that would sustain him throughout his life as an innovative art form and example of black achievement.
Mr. Gilliam moved to Washington in 1962, arriving at the time when Color Field painting, with its reliance on bright, toned colors, was being formulated by the heirs of Abstract Expressionism there and in New York City. Always interested in the physical nature of painting, he carved his own way through the style in the late 1960s, effectively stripping his stained canvases of stretcher bars.
Suspended from ceilings, the works fell and rose in great sweeping paths and loops, guided in part by gravity. Aggressive and seductive at the same time, they crowded into the viewer’s space and provided myriad, seemingly chaotic color and color detail.
While the Drape paintings became a trademark for Mr Gilliam, they were never an exclusive working practice and by the mid-1970s he had moved on, returning to them mainly in a series of public commissions in the 1980s. The rest of his career was a relentless exploration of abstract painting of all kinds, which at times seemed contradictory but also reflected a determination to leave no stone unturned in terms of texture, color or technique.
Quilting was referenced in some works that were found remnants of fabric. Canvas was sometimes collaged on canvas; and adding foreign materials like yarn and glitter was just one of his tactics. It all added up to one of the most diverse careers in post-war abstraction, held together by a boldness of spirit and material.
Mr. Gilliam’s work has not been entirely overlooked in New York’s predominantly white art world, but his career has been centered in Washington, where he has exhibited regularly and repeatedly with galleries from 1963 and has had several museum shows, beginning with one at the Phillips Collection in New York in 1967 and including a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2005.
He also maintained lasting relationships with galleries across the country, from Philadelphia to San Francisco and from Chicago to Houston. While he had several solo shows in New York between 1968 and 1991, they were almost never in the same gallery. Shocking to many, he did not have a solo show at the gallery in New York after 1991 to 2017, when the Mnuchin Gallery hosted one and exhibited work from 1967 to 1973, though he did have a project show at the Modern in 1971 and a small survey in 1982 at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
But Mr. Gilliam, a tall man with unusually intense eyes, was at all times content to remain in Washington, save for the more conspicuous centers of American art. In an oral history interview with Smithsonian in 1989, he said, “I saw the difference between what is really good and real for me and what I dreamed was real and good for me. I’ve learned – I won’t say I’ve learned to love this – but I’ve learned to accept this, the question of staying here.”
