How Sam Gilliam Turned Painting into Sculpture

Throughout the sixty-odd years of his profession as a painter, Sam Gilliam was as relentless an experimenter as may be imagined. Born within the Jim Crow South in 1933, he ultimately settled in Washington, DC, the place he remained till his dying in 2022. When he began out, within the mid-Sixties, Gilliam made intensely hued hard-edged stripe work not dissimilar to these of considerably older Washingtonians equivalent to Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. However by the tip of that decade, he had toned down the colour, now in any case utilized extra fluidly, sparsely, and at instances seemingly randomly on uncooked, unstretched canvases that he draped, twisted, crumpled, and knotted in extravagant methods, like draperies on a Baroque statue. Actually, I’d argue that he’d begun making polychrome sculpture out of the supplies of portray.

These unstretched canvas items break up the distinction between Shade Area portray and Publish-Minimalism. As such, they had been in sync with the contemporaneous post-painting experiments of New York artists equivalent to Lynda Benglis, Concord Hammond, Alvin Loving, and Howardena Pindell—a lot of whom featured within the eye-opening 2006–07 touring exhibition “Excessive Instances, Laborious Instances: New York Portray 1967–1975.” That collection made Gilliam’s identify (he represented the US in Venice in 1972) and he created related works recurrently through the years, however his investigations didn’t cease there. Within the Nineteen Eighties he returned to the aircraft, however with work collaged from cut-up items of typically thickly painted canvas mounted to inflexible backgrounds, completely defiant of the standard pictorial rectangle and typically, a la Frank Stella, constructed in reduction. He has additionally periodically painted on rectangular or round beveled-edge panels.

However that variety of format barely touches on the variousness of Gilliam’s work—on the multitude of the way he has utilized and manipulated paint and different supplies in a spirit Thelma Golden describes as his “refusal to be confined to a selected kind of artwork manufacturing.” The present Gilliam exhibition on view on the Irish Museum of Trendy Artwork (IMMA) in Dublin isn’t in depth—23 works on canvas and paper, all however one from the Nineteen Nineties—nevertheless it illuminates a facet of Gilliam’s oeuvre that has not been a lot seen till now: using stitching in his observe. Whereas Gilliam typically labored on an enormous scale to create works finest appreciated from a sure distance, the unstretched, sewn, or quilted work right here could also be massive, however with their richly detailed surfaces they invite viewers to come back shut. Every bit is an irregular patchwork-like assemblage of variously painted, stained, and printed items of canvas held collectively by very seen machine stitching. Notably shocking, given Gilliam’s affiliation with pure abstraction, is the presence of printed photographic imagery, principally of solely vaguely identifiable botanical types, in a number of of the works. However most fascinating of all, to my eye, is how the stitching itself not solely holds the varied components of the work collectively, however turns into a manner of drawing—one thing often simply tacit in Gilliam’s artwork, implied by the assembly of two edges, however right here an added factor that may be frankly, and joyfully, decorative.

An evidence for these works’ look in Eire is that the nation is a part of their origin story: Touring to a residency in Ballinglen, County Mayo, in 1993, Gilliam realized that the petroleum-based paints he was utilizing couldn’t be shipped there, so he labored on some canvases in his Washington studio prematurely, then despatched them to Ballinglen, the place he set about chopping them up and having a seamstress sew them collectively. The outcomes turned out to be sensible. These work discover a candy spot in Gilliam’s oeuvre: stitched collectively, these rippling, looped sheets of shade are extra strictly constructed than the sooner works utilizing single lengthy rolls of uncooked canvas.

Nonetheless, they really feel freer than the work during which numerous items of canvas are affixed to inflexible helps or stretchers. The artwork historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has convincingly argued that within the latter works, although they don’t actually make use of stitching, “Gilliam definitively pays homage to ‘ladies’s work’ in quilt-like work” because of “their recall of the handcrafted labors of sewing and stitching, their use of a home device for the cleansing and upkeep of carpets, and their frank acknowledgment of the canvas assist as one other textile.” However the sewn-together unstretched work featured in “Stitching Fields” make the acknowledgements and homages much more specific than in any of Gilliam’s different work. As luck would have it, such a lineage turns into particularly patent at IMMA as a result of one of many different exhibitions concurrently on view is of Gee’s Bend quilts. Gilliam himself, as I realized from John Beardsley’s essay for the “Stitching Fields” catalog, owned two Gee’s Bend quilts—“absolutely an indication that for him,” says Beardsley, “the hierarchical distinction between artwork and craft… was all however effaced.”

Gilliam, you would possibly say, beloved distinctions however hated hierarchies. His works ask us to concentrate on the distinctive quiddity of every factor within the multiplicities he saved gathering—to see them and really feel the rightness of their being there on a degree of equality. Did he need us to attract a lesson from this? Laborious to say. Our tradition locations representational calls for on Black artists that Gilliam refused to meet. He was unusually tight-lipped about most features of his aesthetic pondering past his fascination with supplies and their untapped potential. Or because the critic Lilly Wei as soon as politely put it on this journal, he was “courteous however elusive,” not solely about race, however about subject material basically. I believe that needed to do with an thought about freedom—the concept artwork ought to offer you one thing to consider, not let you know what to consider it. As this exhibition suggests, we nonetheless have a lot of pondering to do. And because it clearly demonstrates, Gilliam’s multifarious oeuvre is wealthy with little-known features. When will we see the full-scale retrospective that can sew all of the items collectively?