Sam Gilliam

DC-based painter Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) paved a distinct course through abstraction by way of tireless formal, material and tonal experimentation. During the late 1960s, Gilliam advanced the processes and aesthetics employed by the Color Field painters while radically disrupting the Greenbergian ideal of the contained picture plane. This robust period of output yielded his canonical Beveled-edge and Drape series, which he spent decades elaborating upon.
Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years presents a suite of works created by the late artist in the final years of his life, encompassing arresting variations on his iconic tondos, drapes and beveled-edge paintings. Replete with photographs and foldouts as well as an essay by acclaimed art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, this volume offers an all-encompassing look at Gilliam’s dynamic, vibrant compositions.

Including paintings, sculpture and works on paper, this book documents new works by DC-based color-field painter Sam Gilliam (born 1933). A new interview with the artist brings insight into his life and practice, as well as the experience of making this body of work, which represents an aesthetic shift from Gilliam’s canonical “drape” paintings.

Published for the artist’s inaugural 2020 exhibition at Pace Gallery, in advance of the artist’s solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in spring 2022—which will be Gilliam’s first retrospective in the US in over 15 years—the book also includes new scholarship by Courtney J. Martin and Fred Moten.

Between 1967 and 1973, American abstract painter Sam Gilliam (born 1933) undertook some of the most radical work of his six-decade-plus career, a period culminating in Gilliam's representing the US at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The work, including his Martin Luther King series and Jail Jungle series, reflected the fractured political climate of this period. It was also during this period that Gilliam began his beveled-edge paintings. In these iconic works, Gilliam poured acrylic paint directly onto the unprimed canvas, which he folded and crumpled while the paint was still wet, then stretched the canvas over a chamfered frame. The work in Sam Gilliam: The Music of Color conveys the influence of the DC Color Field school on Gilliam's art, and his blending of the lines between sculpture and painting.