Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, but soon moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he was raised and earned his BFA in 1955 and MA in fine arts in 1961 from the University of Louisville. In 1962, Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C., where he has worked ever since. Gilliam is recognized as one of a group of artists called the Washington Color School who, in the 1960s and 1970s, experimented with pouring thinned pigment over large, unprimed canvases. Among many innovations, Gilliam broke away from the rectangular stretcher and the wall, introducing unstretched, unframed canvases, sometimes of monumental scale, that folded and draped to envelop the viewer in color. His work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at DIA: Beacon.
“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. . . .; to deal with the canvas as material by folding it, crushing it, using it as a means to a tactile way of making painting. . . . One of the things that must be a part of art, . . ., is to form one’s own problem and have tenacity.”