Now 87, the long-overlooked Black artist Sam Gilliam is celebrating new-found fame and several career milestones, including his first solo show in Asia
“My work is about the time, the spirit, in which I live,” says 87-year-old painter Sam Gilliam, talking over the phone from his studio in Washington DC. And what extraordinary times Gilliam has lived through and been motivated by. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, at a time when schools and many public spaces were racially segregated. He was one of the hundreds of thousands present on August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington DC. And last year, he watched as Black Lives Matter movements swept across the US and the globe, proving that equality for all remains a distant dream.
All of this and more is explored in Gilliam’s dramatic, abstract art, which he has been making for six decades. He was first celebrated for his work in the Sixties, when he pulled his colourful canvases off their stretchers and draped them from gallery walls like bedsheets billowing from a clothesline, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. In a 2015 article in The Guardian, acclaimed African American artist Rashid Johnson and Los Angeles-based gallerist David Kordansky—who has worked with Gilliam since 2013—describe this move as being as radical as Jackson Pollock’s decision to flick paint onto canvas, rather than applying it with a brush.
These experimental pieces impressed curators and critics and, in 1971, Gilliam had a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The following year, he represented the US at the Venice Biennale, making him the first Black artist to do so. There wasn’t another until 1997, when Robert Colescott received the honour; in 2022, sculptor Simone Leigh will become the first African American woman to represent the US at the event.
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But it’s in the past five years that Gilliam has experienced his greatest success. He has had several institutional shows, including at the Kunstmuseum Basel and Dia Beacon, and his prices at auction have been shooting skywards. Artnet has reported that 19 of Gilliam’s top 20 sales at auction took place in 2017 or later and, in 2019, his work Lady Day II (1971) sold for US$2.2 million at Christie’s, his highest price to date. To top it all off, in mid-2019 he joined Pace, one of the world’s largest commercial galleries. This year, Pace opened Gilliam’s first solo exhibition in Asia: it started at the gallery’s Seoul space, where it ran from May 27 to July 10, and is now at Pace’s Hong Kong outpost, where it’s showing until August 28.
“I’ve always worked hard to become a good artist; I’ve tried day and night,” says Gilliam, reflecting on his long career. “Now I feel like I’m at the top of the mountain, in a sense.”
The ascent hasn’t always been smooth. Gilliam received critical praise in the Sixties and early Seventies, but his star waned over the next three decades. This has been ascribed to his decision to live in Washington DC rather than the art hub of New York, as well as to his race—his white contemporaries, such as Kenneth Noland, enjoyed steadier success. But it was also because his difficult-to-categorise work defied the two dominant artistic movements of the time: pop art and minimalism.
On top of that, Gilliam was criticised by some for pursuing abstraction rather than engaging more explicitly with Black culture. In the catalogue for Tate Modern’s 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, in which Gilliam’s work was featured, curator Mark Godfrey argues some narrowminded critics felt that “the role and responsibility of Black artists was to create empowering images of their people”.
