sam gilliam

B. 1933 - 2022

Sam Gilliam was known as one of the great innovators in postwar American painting because his work tested the boundaries of abstraction, color, form, texture, and canvas. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s, as America began to see political and social shifts, with works that associated him with the Washington Color School movement. 

“Even though my work is not overtly political, I believe art has the ability to call attention to politics and to remind us of this potential through its presence.” - Sam Gilliam. 

Gilliam’s artistic practice focused on experimenting with a lyrical abstraction of forms, moods, and materials, creating works inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz. His most prominent works included large, manipulated, and unstretched canvases, accompanied by experiments with staining, soaking, and pouring pigments. He was known as a liberator of the canvas, shaking it free from its traditional framework to create loose, paint-splattered folds that cascaded from ceilings, stairwells, and other exhibition spaces. Gilliam’s hallmark Drape paintings transformed the tenets of Abstract Expressionism and introduced sculptural and three-dimensional aspects that redefined abstract painting. 

Gilliam and Raven Editions’ founder, Curlee Raven Holton, met in 1997 when Holton was the director of The Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College. Over the next decade, the two would produce several unique prints in Gilliam’s signature style. Sam would take materials and piece them together, experimenting with sticking materials under the screen to create new images.

“I often had artists visit the studio and attempt to create innovative, unusual works, works that were aimed to be dynamic and multi-medium, but there was one master who could always pull it off and that was Sam Gilliam.” - Curlee Raven Holton 

Gilliam received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Louisville in 1955, and later, he returned to the university to get his Master’s degree in painting in 1961. His work has become part of permanent collections with the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.