Sam Gilliam, an artist who fused painting with sculpture in vividly colored canvases that he removed from their wooden stretchers and suspended in space, died of renal failure on June 25 in Washington, D.C., where he lived and worked for six decades. He was 88.
The work for which he is best known, typically referred to as “drapes,” were at the leading edge of abstract art when he began them in 1967. Accentuating the material properties of paint, he used mops, rakes, brushes and simple gravity to apply vivid color to canvases that hung in space from the ceiling or gathered in bunches from pegs, rather than hanging stretched and flat against the wall. Establishment ideas of advanced art lionized abstraction for emphasizing the distinct formal qualities unique to paintings and to sculptures. Gilliam, however, along with such diverse artists as Jay DeFeo in San Francisco, Eva Hesse in New York and others, crossed those separate circuits. Painting merged with sculpture in lush chromatic fields.
A local schoolteacher, he had been included in a few modest group shows before then, including “The Negro in American Art” at UCLA in 1966 and the inaugural presentation two years later at the Studio Museum in Harlem. But Gilliam erupted onto the national art scene in 1969 with his eye-opening participation in a three-artist exhibition at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, a museum now closed. He suspended huge, brightly painted drapes from skylights at the top of the four-story atrium of the 1897 beaux-arts building.
