Sam Gilliam: a Retrospective at the Speed Art Museum

Saturday, 03 June 2006 09:58

Louisville, KY - Sam Gilliam: a retrospective marks the first full-career retrospective of Sam Gilliam and the most extensive presentation of his work to date.  Gilliam first achieved widespread acclaim in the late 1960s with his groundbreaking draped paintings, which blur distinctions between painting, sculpture and architecture.  Now into his fifth decade as an artist, Gilliam, who has been described as the most prominent African American abstract painter, continues to create innovative approaches that influence younger generations of artists.  Retrospective reveals the hallmarks of Gilliam’s constantly evolving aesthetic: exploration, risk and formal invention.  The exhibition features monumental paintings, elaborate mixed-media constructions and installations.  Organized and circulated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Sam Gilliam: a retrospective is on view at the Speed Art Museum through September 3, 2006.

“Sam Gilliam’s concentrated focus on painting and his belief that, as a discipline made up of objects, it is essentially no different from sculpture radically distinguishes him from his contemporaries who were also interested in furthering the modernist tradition, including color-field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and the artists associated with the Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland,” notes Jonathan P. Binstock, exhibition organizer and Corcoran Curator of Contemporary Art.  “Gilliam’s ambition was, and still is, not just to reinvigorate the modernist tradition, but also to create new possibilities by thinking outside the dominant critical modes through which modernism is generally understood.”

Featuring approximately 40 works dating from 1967 to the present, a retrospective highlights Gilliam’s early Beveled-edge and Draped paintings, his White and Black paintings of the 1970s, metal and wood constructions of the 1980s and 1990s and monochromatic Slatts of recent years.  His early Slice paintings are distinguished by the rhythmic patterns of their painted creases, which he made by folding acrylic-soaked canvases like accordions and allowing them to dry before unfurling them to see what he had made.  Deep Beveled-edge stretchers create the impression that these paintings, with Gilliam’s sybaritic color combinations, are emerging from the wall as objects of weight, substance and sculptural presence.

To create his renowned Draped, or suspended, paintings, Gilliam discarded the stretcher completely, allowing his soaked and stained canvases to sag and hang from gallery ceilings and to interact with sculptural elements, such as handmade sawhorses or site-specific architectural details.  Sometimes monumental in scale, these lyrical works swing through space, on occasion enabling viewers to walk under and through them, giving individuals the opportunity to be literally enveloped by painterly color.

In the past, critics have tended either to explain Gilliam’s achievements as a Washington Color School artist or to situate his work within the confines of an African American art tradition.  To concentrate too much on either account is to miss the brilliance and scope of his remarkable career, and his significant contributions to abstraction.

A Washington, D.C. resident, Gilliam has been included in numerous museum and gallery shows and his career was effectively launched in a group show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969.  His first solo museum showcases were in 1968 at The Phillips Collection and in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  He was one of six artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among other notable institutions, collect his work. Gilliam’s art is also represented in public collections abroad, including the Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Tate Gallery, London.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by the first fully illustrated in-depth scholarly publication, published by the University of California Press, devoted to Sam Gilliam.  The approximately 220-page catalogue documents the works in the exhibition, as well as other Gilliam projects, including examples of his public commissions, site-specific temporary installations and a stage set design.  Complete with more than 75 full-color images and 30 black-and-white illustrations, the catalogue features an essay by Jonathan P. Binstock, the exhibition’s organizer and Corcoran Curator of Contemporary Art.

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION
Sam Gilliam: a retrospective is organized and circulated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and made possible through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and Ellen and Gerry Sigal.  Sam Gilliam: a retrospective is curated by Jonathan P. Binstock, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

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