Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was born on the thirtieth of November 1933 in Tupelo, Mississippi, the seventh of eight children of Sam Gilliam Sr. — a railroad worker and carpenter — and Estery Gilliam, a schoolteacher. In 1942 the family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where the boy who once dreamed of becoming a cartoonist was encouraged in his drawing by his mother. He earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in painting at the University of Louisville, with an interval of United States Army service in the late 1950s.

In 1962 Gilliam settled in Washington, D.C., where he fell in with the Washington Color School. Under the mentorship of Thomas Downing he abandoned figuration for the luminous, stained fields of color that would become his signature — then pressed far beyond the movement's flat planes into process and sculpture.

Around the late 1960s, watching laundry billow on clotheslines outside his studio, Gilliam did the thing for which he is revered: he freed the canvas from its stretcher. His great Drape paintings — vast, paint-soaked cloth suspended from walls and ceilings — dissolved the boundary between painting, sculpture, and architecture, and earned him the name father of the draped canvas. In 1972 he was among the first African American artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, showing three monumental Drapes; he was preceded at Venice in 1956 by Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis.

He spent his whole adult life in Washington, becoming the acknowledged dean of its arts community, and died there on the twenty-fifth of June 2022, aged eighty-eight. He is honored as the painter who taught the canvas to unfurl, and made color itself take flight.