T eeming with vitality, the ruminative composition of Sam Gilliam’s Cielo shatters the limitations of abstract painting by expanding into the third dimension—a feat accomplished through his sculptural beveled-edge canvas and synonymous with his celebrated Slice paintings. Executed between 1971 and 1972, this work is evocative of the most essential period in the artist’s oeuvre; Gilliam would conclude 1972 as the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. In Cielo, Gilliam demonstrates his dexterous ability to manipulate space and color, as evidenced by the constellations of magentas, blues and yellows that blush through the canvas's protruding surface. Charged with musical energy, rhythmic folds indicative of Gilliam’s practice add dynamic vectors that stretch beyond the painting’s edges. Together, the combination of painterly abstraction and sculptural disposition coalesce into an unmistakable triumph, situating Cielo as a highlight amongst Gilliams’ most transformative years. With beveled-edge works residing in such distinguished permanent collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., the importance of this series has been solidified with wide acclaim.

In the early 1960s, Gilliam was a fixture of Washington D.C.'s burgeoning jazz scene, employed as a concert promoter who championed the likes of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Marian Anderson. At a time where jazz and the Civil Rights Movement were inextricably linked, Gilliam has often cited jazz music as an essential predecessor to his artistic practice. With Cielo, Gilliam’s attention to musicality is at its most palpable; the improvisational folding and staining of the canvas results in the painting’s dynamic rhythm. Mary Schmidt Campbell, the former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, likened his painting to the abstractions of jazz music, contending “Gilliam’s cascades of color are not unlike [John] Coltrane’s sheets of sound.” Spontaneity is essential to Gilliam’s work, as he relies on unpredictable outcomes of spattering, pleating, and hanging his canvases to produce his mesmerizing compositions. Deep creases intersect the work, a testament to Gilliam’s guiding gestures that recall his groundbreaking drape works. Despite its taught surface, Cielo channels the attention to depth and gravity typically present in the inherently sculptural drape works—its beveled edge challenging the traditional squared canvas support and with it, the perception of Gilliam's explorations of process and color.

To create the attractive, cosmic folds in Cielo, Gilliam generously applies diluted acrylic paints to an unprimed canvas. The wet-on-wet application of paint had a cumulative effect of kaleidoscopic brilliance and atmospheric depth. Grooves and ripples mimic the qualities of light and shadow within the abstraction. Vestiges of Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique can be traced in Gilliam’s beveled-edge abstractions; however, his technique relies upon his own approach to canvas manipulation and gravity—an exciting marriage of premeditation and improvisation. These interventions of chance reveal the artist’s unique gesture, and when unfurled reveal a map of the interactions between Gilliam’s body and the canvas. But it is the final achievement of the third dimension that signals the genius of the Slice paintings. Once stretched over the beveled-edges of the canvas, the courageous protrusion of the surface engages the viewer by entering their space, a feature exclusive to Gilliam’s abstractions.

In Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, Jessica Bell Brown, Head of the Contemporary Department at the Baltimore Museum of Art, fixates on Gilliam’s relationship to surface in the entirety of his work, “These paintings ask us as viewers to be in them as much as they call out to be seen. In this sense, by forcing viewers to reckon with imposing forms and with their own bodies in actual space, abstractionists such as Gilliam called attention to ongoing debates about the ontological status of the artwork and of the body.” Bell Brown identifies the alluring conclusions of Gilliam’s paintings, citing the immersive qualities of the Slice paintings, but also of the contemplative color field indicative of Gilliam’s Drape paintings. Gilliam is cognizant of this relationality, the sculptural aspects of Cielo is the invention that establishes this work’s lasting art historical significance. By challenging the boundaries of painting and sculpture, Gilliam’s beveled canvases represent his enduring mark on the history of art.

Gilliam’s work contests the notion that Black artists were obligated to be political in subject, a long held belief touted by artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement. But in his pursuit of abstraction, Gilliam expanded the definition of the Black artist, while still championing blackness as an inseparable aspect of his work. In the interview Since the Harlem Renaissance, Gilliam resisted strict expectations on Black art, suggesting instead that “Figurative art doesn’t represent blackness any more than a non-narrative media-oriented kind of painting, like what I do.” Gilliam was one of very few African American artists associated with the Washington Color School in the 1970s, alongside Alma Thomas. While evoking the same lyricism and immediacy of fellow Washington Color School peers such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Gilliam nonetheless created abstract works that defied the group’s preference for flat planes of color. In Gilliam’s hands, the picture plane rose out of two dimensions to become a compositional element in and of itself, a conceptual breakthrough that influenced a new generation of abstract painters for decades to come.

Artist

Sam Gilliam