About Time
At 87, the long-overlooked African American artist Sam Gilliam is celebrating new-found fame and several career milestones, including his first solo show in Asia
At 87, the long-overlooked African American artist Sam Gilliam is celebrating new-found fame and several career milestones
“My work is about the time, the spirit, in which I live,” says 87-year-old painter Sam Gilliam, talking over the phone from his studio in Washington DC.
And what extraordinary times Gilliam has lived through and been motivated by. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, at a time when schools and many public spaces were racially segregated. He was one of the hundreds of thousands present on August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington DC. And last year, he watched as Black Lives Matter movements swept across the US and the globe, proving that equality for all remains a distant dream.
All of this and more is explored in Gilliam’s dramatic, abstract art, which he has been making for six decades. He was first celebrated for his work in the Sixties, when he pulled his colourful canvases off their stretchers and draped them from gallery walls like bedsheets billowing from a clothesline, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. In a 2015 article in The Guardian, acclaimed African American artist Rashid Johnson and Los Angeles-based gallerist David Kordansky—who has worked with Gilliam since 2013—describe this move as being as radical as Jackson Pollock’s decision to flick paint onto canvas, rather than applying it with a brush.
These experimental pieces impressed curators and critics and, in 1971, Gilliam had a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The following year, he represented the US at the Venice Biennale, making him the first Black artist to do so. There wasn’t another until 1997, when Robert Colescott received the honour; in 2022, sculptor Simone Leigh will become the first African American woman to represent the US at the event.
But it’s in the past five years that Gilliam has experienced his greatest success. He has had several institutional shows, including at the Kunstmuseum Basel and Dia: Beacon, and his prices at auction have been shooting skywards. Artnet has reported that 19 of Gilliam’s top 20 sales at auction took place in 2017 or later and, in 2019, his work Lady Day II (1971) sold for US$2.2 million at Christie’s, his highest price to date. To top it all off, in mid-2019 he joined Pace, one of the world’s largest commercial galleries. This year, Pace opened Gilliam’s first solo exhibition in Asia: it started at the gallery’s Seoul space, where it ran from May 27 to July 10, and is now at Pace’s Hong Kong outpost, where it’s showing until August 28.
“I’ve always worked hard to become a good artist; I’ve tried day and night,” says Gilliam, reflecting on his long career. “Now I feel like I’m at the top of the mountain, in a sense.”
The ascent hasn’t always been smooth. Gilliam received critical praise in the Sixties and early Seventies, but his star waned over the next three decades. This has been ascribed to his decision to live in Washington DC rather than the art hub of New York, as well as to his race—his white contemporaries, such as Kenneth Noland, enjoyed steadier success. But it was also because his difficult-to-categorise work defied the two dominant artistic movements of the time: pop art and minimalism.
On top of that, Gilliam was criticised by some for pursuing abstraction rather than engaging more explicitly with Black culture. In the catalogue for Tate Modern’s 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, in which Gilliam’s work was featured, curator Mark Godfrey argues some narrow-minded
critics felt that “the role and responsibility of Black artists was to create empowering images of their people”.
Gilliam scoffs at this argument. He has always been adamant that abstract pieces can be just as powerful as figurative ones, if not more so. “Abstract art can be more political than figuration,” he says. “When abstract art gets to the core, it’s much more open to the environment, to different situations, than anything else.”
With that in mind, it’s possible to read Gilliam’s splintered fields of colour as representations of a fracturing world. His act of taking his paint-splattered canvases out of their frames in the Sixties can be understood as an attempt to break down the divisions between art forms—an abstract, artistic interpretation of the way pioneers of the civil rights movement were fighting for new freedoms in their lives.
And, although it is often not immediately obvious, many of Gilliam’s pieces are directly inspired by moments from Black history. He treasures his memory of the March on Washington in 1963, when he watched King’s speech to 250,000 people, who had travelled from all corners of the US to call for an end to racism. “I carried that [memory] to the studio and made a series of paintings, April 4, [named after] the day MLK was assassinated,” he says. One work from that series, a roughly 3.5m by 4m canvas stained with shades of red and purple, is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is also influenced by Black pop culture: the aforementioned auction-recordbreaking painting was named after singer Billie Holiday, whose nickname was Lady Day. Other recent works were inspired by Beyoncé and Serena Williams.
For the Seoul and Hong Kong exhibition, Gilliam is showing pieces from a new series inspired by archaeology. He has covered canvases in layers and layers of pigment and fabric, buried those in inches of thick white paint, then dug through that surface with a rake, revealing the hundreds of colours hidden beneath.
It might be his first solo show in Asia, but Gilliam has long been interested in the region: many of his paintings are on Japanese washi paper and, from 1956 to 1958, he lived in Japan, where he was stationed as part of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps of the US Army.
“My time in Japan was really wonderful,” says Gilliam, who regularly visited galleries and art supply stores in the country, as well as a woodcut studio near his base. “I was there for 18 months in peacetime, after the Korean War. I was stationed in Yokohama but, as soldiers who were there to rebuild the place, we got to travel a lot. I spent time in Tokyo and Yokohama, touring.” His months in the country would go on to shape his future. “At the time, Tokyo was really exploding with visual art. The Japanese were interested in western art. I saw a great show in Tokyo of Yves Klein blue. It was like a real long drink of something that was refreshing. That time cemented my resolve to be an artist.”
Looking back on his life, Gilliam seems torn. He is thrilled with the recent surge of interest in his art but, on a larger societal level, is distressed that racism remains rife in the US and internationally, and that the marches he attended in his youth haven’t led to long-term change. “It’s a very extreme time in America. It’s a time of intense and awful fear. An era of white supremacy that reminds you of the history of the making of America—and even the making of the world,” he says. But he’s not totally without hope. “It’s like a violent storm. We’re in the middle of a great storm, but if we go through it, we hope we’ll find cleaner air, cleaner water, greater respect for animal life—and human freedoms.”
Sam Gilliam’s exhibition runs until August 28 at Pace, Hong Kong
“It’s a very extreme time in America. It’s a time of intense and awful fear. An era of white supremacy”
—SAM GILLIAM