Sam Gilliam, abstract artist who went beyond the frame, dies at 88
Sam Gilliam, a Washington artist who helped redefine abstract painting by liberating canvas from its traditional framework and shaking it loose in lavish, paint-spattered folds cascading from ceilings, stairwells and other architectural elements, died June 25 at his home in the District of Columbia. He was 88.
The cause was kidney disease, said Adriana Elgarresta, public relations director of New York’s Pace Gallery, which represents his work.
Gilliam was a relatively unknown art teacher in Washington, D.C.-area schools when he burst to international attention in 1969 for an exhibition that stunned the art community with its bravado.
Resembling a painter’s giant dropcloths, his flowing, unstructured canvases, known as drapes, appeared in what was then known as the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The extravagantly colored swags of fabric were suspended from the skylight of the Beaux-Arts building’s four-story atrium and prompted then-Washington Star art critic Benjamin Forgey to summarize the impact as “one of those watermarks by which the Washington art community measures its evolution.”
In a matter of months, Gilliam would become known throughout the country and later around the world as the painter who had knocked painting out of its frame. Over a career that spanned decades and several stylistic changes — not all of them as well received as his drapes — Gilliam would forever be known as an artistic innovator because of the Corcoran show.
Gilliam was never officially a member of the Washington Color School, the city-based painting movement whose practitioners rose to international prominence in the 1960s with a celebration of pure color. But he quickly became acknowledged as the face of the Color School’s second wave.
His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, London’s Tate Modern and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
He had many public commissions, including for the Kennedy Center and a mural at Reagan National Airport. His career capstone, a commission by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, was a sprawling, five-panel work that was 28 feet wide. He called it “Yet Do I Marvel,” after the poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen.
Gilliam continued to surpass himself — setting, and then breaking, multiple auction records for the price of his art, which in 2018 skyrocketed to $2.2 million for his 1971 canvas “Lady Day II.” At 83, he was invited to show at the 2017 Venice Biennale — 45 years after he made history as the first African American artist to represent his country in that exhibition. A career retrospective of his work is on display at the Hirshhorn until Sept. 11.
Although most often identified with the drape paintings, a style he would return to throughout his career, Gilliam was known for restless experimentation. In addition to the occasional foray into more-traditional stretched canvas, he also explored collage, hinged wood panels and other forms of three-dimensional construction. By his own account, Gilliam estimated that he went through more than 100 gallons of paint a year. Not all of that ended up on canvas. For many years, he lived in a Mount Pleasant rowhouse whose exterior was an ever-changing advertisement for its owner’s line of work.
Sam Gilliam Jr. was born in Tupelo, Miss., on Nov. 30, 1933, the seventh of eight children. His father was a carpenter and his mother was a seamstress. The family settled in Louisville during World War II. In 1955, Gilliam graduated from the University of Louisville with a bachelor’s degree in creative art. After a stint as an Army clerk in Japan, he returned to his alma mater and earned a master’s degree in painting in 1961. In 1962, he arrived in Washington, following his college sweetheart and new bride, the former Dorothy Butler, who had been hired as a Post reporter and would later become a columnist for the paper. The marriage ended in divorce.
He accepted a position as an art instructor at the Washington, D.C’s McKinley Technical High School, the first of several teaching positions.
Survivors include his wife, Washington art dealer Annie Gawlak; three daughters from his first marriage, Stephanie Gilliam, Melissa Gilliam and Leah Franklin Gilliam; three sisters; and three grandchildren.