Construct, 2018
b. 1933, Tupelo, MS
d. 2022, Washington, D.C.
Sam Gilliam was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the context in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2005, solo exhibitions of Gilliam’s work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1976, 1996, 2006); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1967, 2011); Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); Dia Beacon, New York (2019–22), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2022), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2025–26), among many other institutions.
His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide including The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; and Tate, London, among many others.