How Sam Gilliam Turns Painting into Sculpture

During his sixty-five years as a painter, Sam Gilliam imagined it as relentlessly as the experimenter. Gilliam was born in the south of Jim Crow in 1933 and eventually settled in Washington, D.C. until his death in 2022. He made strongly calling for hard-dressed striped paintings at the beginning of the mid-1960s, with no similarities to some older Washingtonians like Gene Davavisis and Kenneth Noland. But by the end of that decade he had already faded the color, and now in any case it was smoother, sparse, and sometimes seemed to be randomly painted on the original, unstretched canvas, which he draped, twisted, wrinkled, wrinkled and knotted, knotted in luxury like the drawer on the Baroque statue. Actually, I think he started making multi-color sculptures with painted materials.

Those unstretched canvas pieces split the difference between color field painting and postmaximism. So they kept in sync with New York artists such as Lynda Benglis, Harmony Hammond, Alvin Loving and Howardena Pindell, who were also in the 2006-07 travel exhibition, “The Tough Times, The Tough Times: New York Painting 1967-197–1975.” The series is under the name of Gilliam (who represented the United States in 1972), and he has often created similar works over the years, but his investigation has not stopped there. In the 1980s, he returned to the plane, but was collaged with paintings from often painted thick canvas fixed on rigid backgrounds, which completely defied the traditional painting rectangle, sometimes La Frank Stella, and was loose. He also regularly paints on rectangular or circular bevel panels.

However, the diversity of this format involves little of Gilliam’s work, which is the many ways he uses and manipulates paint and other materials in the spirit, as Thelma Golden describes as “rejecting restriction in a particular type of artwork.” Currently viewed at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin is not extensive – there are 23 works on canvas and paper, all but the 1990s – but it articulates one side of Gilliam’s work until now: using sewing in his practice. Although Gilliam often creates works on a large scale at a certain distance, the best appreciated at a certain distance, the stitching, sewing or sewing paintings here may be large, but with its rich detailed surface they invite the audience to approach. Each piece is an irregular patchwork combination that is a variety of painted, dyed and printed canvases sewn together by a very obvious machine. Given Gilliam’s association with pure abstraction, it is particularly surprising that the existence of printed photographic images, with several of the works mainly only fuzzy and recognizable plant forms. But what seems to me most is how the stitching itself not only integrates the various parts of the painting, but will become a way to paint – usually just implied by meetings that default to the two edges in Gilliam’s art, and here is an extra element that can be frankly and cheerful, and delightfully.

One explanation for the emergence of these works in Ireland is that the country is part of its origin story: In 1993, traveling to a residence in Ballinglen, Mayo County, Gilliam realized that the oil-based paint he used could not be transported there, so he worked on some canvases in Washington, and then sent them to his Washington, and then sent them to his sewing and sewing them to their sewing and sewing them to their sewing and sewing them to their sewing and sewing them to their sewing. It turns out to be excellent. These paintings find a sweet spot in Gilliam’s work: stitched together, these ripples, looping colored sheets are constructed more strictly than the Raw Canvas using a single long scroll.

Nevertheless, they feel more freer than the various canvases fixed to rigid support or stretcher paintings. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson convincingly argues that in the latter’s works, although they did not adopt sewing, “Gilliam pays homage to the ‘women’s works’ in quilt-like paintings,” thanks to “they recall their memories of handmade workers, whose sewing tools can be used to clean and maintain, their texts are the scope of Cables, and affirm the scope of Cables. However, the sewn paintings sewn in the “Sewing Field” are more clear than those of Gilliam’s other works. As luck would have it, such a lineage is particularly patented on Imma, as one of the other exhibitions is also Gee’s Bend Quilts. Gilliam himself, as I learned from John Beardsley’s article on the “Sewing Field” catalog, has two of Gee’s curved quilts – “It’s certainly a sign for him,” Beardsley said, “the hierarchical distinction between art and craft…is almost gone.”

You might say that Gilliam likes distinctions but hates hierarchy. His work requires us to focus on the uniqueness of each element of the plurality he has been collecting to see them and feel their properness there, to some extent equal. Does he want us to learn from this? It’s hard to say. Our culture will Gilliam reject the demands of representation of black artists that are fulfilled. Apart from his obsession with materials and untapped potential, he was very nervous about most aspects of aesthetic thinking. Or, as critic Lilly Wei once said politely in this magazine, he is “polite but elusive”, not only about race, but about subject matter in general. I think it has something to do with the idea of freedom – art should give you some thoughts about thinking, not telling you how to view it. As the exhibition suggests, we still have a lot of thought. As clearly shown, Gilliam’s multiple works have little known aspects. When will we see a full-scale retrospective that sews all the pieces together?