Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was born on the thirtieth of November 1933 at Tupelo, Mississippi, the seventh of eight children of Sam Gilliam Sr. — a Black railroad worker of the Frisco line — and Estery Gilliam, a teacher. The family moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1934 when his father took a Louisville and Nashville Railroad posting. He was raised in the segregated Black Louisville of the late inter-war period and educated at the Central High School at Louisville.

He took the bachelor’s in art at the University of Louisville in 1955 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the institution after the integration of the University of Louisville in 1950. He served the United States Army between 1956 and 1958 as a private and was stationed at Japan and Korea.

He took the master’s in painting at the University of Louisville in 1961 — the first Black graduate of the institution’s master’s programme — and relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1962 with his wife the journalist Dorothy Butler, whom he had married in 1962.

He entered at Washington in 1962 the orbit of the Washington Color School — the loose New York School-derivative colour-field painters’ circle of the post-1960 Washington of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring. Gilliam was the only Black member of the circle and the principal Black abstract-expressionist of the post-war Washington period.

He undertook from 1968 the principal innovation of his pictorial career — the unstretched ‘Drape’ paintings, in which acrylic-pigmented canvas was hung directly from the architectural support of the gallery or museum without a stretcher frame, the painting taking the form of the suspension. The Drape paintings between 1968 and 1972 were the first systematic unstretched colour-field paintings in the New York School lineage and were widely cited as the principal post-Pollock formal extension of the colour-field tradition.

He represented the United States at the 1972 Thirty-sixth Venice Biennale at the United States Pavilion under the curator John Coplans — the first African American to represent the United States at the Biennale in the eighty-three-year history of the event.

He completed during the same year the principal Drape installation of his career — the four-thousand-square-foot Seahorses installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art atrium of 1975 — and the principal post-Drape colour-field work — the Black series of 1977–1982 — that returned to the stretched-canvas format.

He was the principal Black participant of the closing-period Documenta exhibitions at Kassel — at Documenta 6 in 1977 and Documenta 7 in 1982 — and was awarded the 2018 Smithsonian Visionary Artist Award.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-fifth of June 2022 of complications of kidney failure, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the first African American at the Venice Biennale.