Last week, celebrated artist Sam Gilliam passed away at 88 years old. Gilliam, whose work is presently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum, reportedly died from kidney disease.
Sam Gilliam is one of the most famous revolutionaries of the art world. He is most famous for his drape artworks of the 1960s. Taking unstretched canvases and pinning them to walls or ceilings, they cascade like waterfalls.
His pieces never hang the same way twice. Gilliam’s inspiration comes from the way laundry hangs on a clothesline. And he had probably seen a lot of it, being the seventh child in a family of eight.
One of the leading artists of the Washington Colour School of the 1950s, Sam Gilliam is one of the most important and influential abstract visual artists of his time. Born in 1933, he was ignored for much of his early career by the elite parts of the art world due to his colour. He rose to fame when he moved to a studio in Washington DC in 1962. From there he began exhibiting regularly with galleries and museums.
Freeing the Canvas
Back then, colour work was in the air. Pollock had been pouring, dribbling and spraying paint onto canvasses on the floor. Gilliam wanted to free the canvas itself from the restrictions of its binary edges. Gilliam is highly influential to young artists who employ blur painting and sculpture – from David Hammons to Oscar Murillo.
“People are only now realizing the huge debt that is owed to Gilliam,” says Dunham Townend, head of the modern and contemporary art department at Freeman’s.
He is survived by his second wife, his three daughters from his first marriage, and three grandchildren. He learned to accept the matter of staying here… By leaving behind a flourishing legacy.
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