Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam radically expanded the possibilities of postwar abstraction by treating color, support, and architectural space as interdependent elements. Emerging from Washington, DC, during the 1960s, he absorbed the chromatic intensity of the Washington Color School while rejecting the fixed rectangular format associated with conventional painting. His stained and folded canvases introduced creases, accumulations, and layered surfaces, while the celebrated Drape paintings removed canvas from the stretcher altogether, suspending it in space as a fluid, sculptural form. Across subsequent decades, Gilliam continued to move between painting, relief, collage, installation, and public art, guided by an experimental approach often connected to the improvisational structures of jazz.

Published by Phaidon and developed in close collaboration with the Sam Gilliam Foundation, this major monograph provides the first comprehensive survey of the breadth of the artist’s five-decade career. Its 304 pages reproduce approximately 200 works and include previously unpublished archival material, encompassing Gilliam’s paintings, sculptural constructions, works on paper, and public commissions. Newly commissioned contributions by novelist and poet Ishmael Reed, art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell, and curator Andria Hickey examine the artist’s life, methods, and historical position. Rather than isolating the Drape paintings as a single breakthrough, the book presents Gilliam’s practice as a sustained process of reinvention and establishes an essential foundation for understanding his place within American abstraction and the wider history of postwar art.