Sam Gilliam

Visual artist Sam Gilliam was an innovative color field painter whose work constantly pioneered new approaches and explorations. He emerged in the mid 1960s with large color stained canvases he draped and suspended from walls and ceilings. For subsequent decades he continued to pioneer new and experimental approaches to color and abstraction with a variety of forms, moods, and materials. His innovations included geometric collages, black paintings, quilted paintings, and textured paintings.

In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gilliam was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), among many other institutions.

Gilliam's work is in more than fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to museum and gallery exhibitions, Gilliam created public commissions for art on a monumental scale.

In addition, Gilliam was a dedicated teacher and taught first in the Louisville public schools, followed by nearly a decade in the Washington public schools, and then at the Maryland Institute, College of Art and the University of Maryland, and for several years at Carnegie Mellon University.