Sam Gilliam’s artistic life was bookended by success against the odds. In 1972, he became the first Black artist to represent the US at the world’s most prestigious art festival, the Venice Biennale. He had overcome poverty and prejudice in the south to study art at one of the first desegregated universities, and, after settling in Washington, was hailed as a radical innovator within the group of abstract painters dubbed the Color School.
Pushing his medium in new sculptural directions, he broke convention by taking his canvases off their wooden stretchers. His best-known colour-drenched works have an improvisatory quality, never installed the same way twice, whether they’re draped on the wall or hung tent-like from the ceiling.
