Sam Gilliam, a pioneering abstract painter best known for his lusciously stained Drape paintings, which took his medium more fully into three-dimensions than any other artist of his generation, died on Saturday at his home in Washington. He was 88.
His death was announced by the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and the Pace Gallery, New York. The cause was renal failure.
Mr. Gilliam was twice an anomaly. As a Black artist he was largely ignored by the upper levels of the art world until late in his career (although in 1972 he became the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale). And as a Black artist committed to abstraction, he devoted his life to paintings that refrained from the recognizable images and overt political messages favored by many of his Black colleagues. Yet his art was in many ways opposed to both painting and political art as usual.
Mr. Gilliam came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, a period of great experimentation for abstract painting in a time of political and social turmoil, amid the Vietnam War and the Black struggle for civil rights. But even in this context he was especially daring.
A brilliant colorist, he became known for emancipating his paintings from the flat rectilinearity imposed by wood stretchers. Instead, he draped his unstretched abstract canvases from ceilings in great curves and loops, or pinned them, gathered, to walls. In “‘A’ and the Carpenter, I” of 1973, he piled a great swath of canvas painted with airy clouds of pink and blue between two wooden sawhorses, introducing an element of manual labor into a work that seemed elegant, if unfinished, and that, like much of Mr. Gilliam’s work, appeared different each time it was installed.
These efforts hovered between painting and sculpture, while his techniques evoked everything from Jackson Pollock’s drips to tie-dye. They pushed the medium far beyond the wall-hung shaped canvases created at the time by Frank Stella and his followers. They were at once aggressive and lyrical, impinging on the viewer’s space and providing moments of gorgeous, flowing color while refusing a single, secure, centered point of view. And they challenged the viewer at every turn to decide: “Is this a painting?”
This in itself created a kind of visual tumult that suited the works’ unsettled times. A painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is simply titled “10/27/69,” placing itself against the backdrop of a period of immense protests against the war in Vietnam.
“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political,” Mr. Gilliam said in a 2018 interview with José da Silva in The Art Newspaper. “My work is as political as it is formal.”
Mr. Gilliam’s use of unstretched fabric that referred to painting without quite embracing it influenced artists over several generations, including David Hammons, Jessica Stockholder and Rashid Johnson.
“There’s something incredibly important in Sam’s employment of improvisation that continues to influence my generation and beyond,” Mr. Johnson said in a phone interview on Monday. “It is capable of transcending race but is not limited to not discussing race. For me, he’s been a beacon of light.”
Sam Gilliam was born on Nov. 30, 1933, in Tupelo Miss., the seventh of eight children. His father, also named Sam, was a farmer; his mother, Estery Gilliam, was a seamstress and homemaker. Sam showed an interest in drawing at an early age. When it was pointed out to his mother that he spent a lot of time quietly drawing in the dirt, she supplied him with paper and cardboard; it meant one less child to keep track of. Horses were a favorite, nearly fanatical, subject.
Raised primarily in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Gilliam received most of his formal education attending middle and high schools there that placed an unusual emphasis on art. He went on to study at the University of Louisville, where he received undergraduate…
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