Is it a painting? Or a sculpture? Sam Gilliam’s artworks, which have again been in the spotlight for the past ten years, are located in an intermediate area. His most famous canvases hung loosely on the wall with bright colors and large stains. Elegant, large and also chaotic.
Gilliam grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, as the youngest of seven children. He specialized in painting at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. At the end of the sixties he came up with the idea to use the canvas in a radically different way: he freed the linen from the stretcher. He painted the canvas, folded or stuffed it, and hung it on the wall. Gilliam made this experimental drape paintings as he himself said ‘in response to painting’.
Because Gilliam made spots and paint dripped on his canvas, his technique is reminiscent of the famous abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). But Gilliam was especially inspired by the Washington Color School art movement, which was founded by Morris Louis (1912-1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924-2010). In the 1960s, Gilliam also joined this art movement of abstract color field-painters.
As an African-American artist, Gilliam was an exception in the white art world of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, black artists were expected to focus on political or explicitly socially engaged art and not on abstract art. Gilliam didn’t see this contrast very sharply: ‘My works of art are just as much political as they are stylistic.’
In 1972 Gilliam, along with five other artists, represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. A great honour, according to the article in The New York Times at the time: ‘The American pavilion still elicits the most curiosity and the highest expectations, because American art is the standard by which developments in other countries are measured.’
After the success of the seventies, it became quiet around Gilliam. He was not represented by any major gallery, and although museums had purchased his works of art, they often remained in depots. When gallery owner David Kordansky visited the artist in 2012 with the proposal to create an exhibition, Gilliam burst into tears of joy and said, ‘Why did it take so long?’
Kordanksy’s zeal to bring Gilliam’s oeuvre back to the fore has certainly paid off. Five years after the meeting, one of Gilliam’s canvases was shown again at the Venice Biennale and he had a solo exhibition in New York for the first time in 32 years. In addition, his art was featured in the much-discussed ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Back Power’ exhibition in London, which subsequently traveled to three American museums. In this exhibition hung the canvas with bright red spots that Gilliam made in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Gilliam’s artworks are also doing well on the art market these days. In 2018, the four-meter wide canvas was painted in New York Lady Day II from 1971 auctioned for more than 2 million euros† The cloth, which has been folded wet, is covered with red, blue, green, yellow and white spots. It’s a tribute to Billie Holiday. Gilliam loved jazz and also listened to it while painting: ‘The drama of music and the drama of colors come together.’