Sam Gilliam

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.