Sam Gilliam

Private Collection, Florida

“What was most personal to me were the things I saw in my own environment -- such as clotheslines filled with clothes with so much weight that they had to be propped up…. That was a pertinent clue.”

- Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam’s expansive oeuvre is widely recognized as “one of the great testaments to the continued vitality of abstraction” in our present moment [1]. Often associated with the Washington Color School, a group of painters led by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland that emerged in the Washington, D.C. in the postwar era, Gilliam began developing an expressive, improvisational approach to abstraction in the late 1960s, utilizing experimental painting techniques that incorporated elements of chance (i.e., staining and folding) and a multiplicity of materials and forms. Arguably the most significant African American abstract painter of the twentieth century, Gilliam is credited for expanding the two-dimensional aesthetic ideals of the Washington Color School and post-painterly abstraction in pursuit of lyrical and colorful three-dimensional works that actively engage the wall and space around them.

 [1.] Binstock, Jonathan P. 2005. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective [exh. cat.], Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: p. 5.