How Sam Gilliam Turned Painting into Sculpture

Across the sixty-odd years of his career as a painter, Sam Gilliam was as relentless an experimenter as can be imagined. Born in the Jim Crow South in 1933, he eventually settled in Washington, DC, where he remained until his death in 2022. When he started out, in the mid-1960s, Gilliam made intensely hued hard-edged stripe paintings not dissimilar to those of somewhat older Washingtonians such as Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. But by the end of that decade, he had toned down the color, now in any case applied more fluidly, sparsely, and at times seemingly randomly on raw, unstretched canvases that he draped, twisted, crumpled, and knotted in extravagant ways, like draperies on a Baroque statue. In fact, I’d argue that he’d begun making polychrome sculpture out of the materials of painting.

Those unstretched canvas pieces split the difference between Color Field painting and Post-Minimalism. As such, they were in sync with the contemporaneous post-painting experiments of New York artists such as Lynda Benglis, Harmony Hammond, Alvin Loving, and Howardena Pindell—many of whom featured in the eye-opening 2006–07 traveling exhibition “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975.” That series made Gilliam’s name (he represented the US in Venice in 1972) and he created similar works recurrently over the years, but his investigations didn’t stop there. In the 1980s he returned to the plane, but with paintings collaged from cut-up pieces of often thickly painted canvas fixed to rigid backgrounds, utterly defiant of the conventional pictorial rectangle and sometimes, a la Frank Stella, constructed in relief. He has also periodically painted on rectangular or circular beveled-edge panels.

But that diversity of format barely touches on the variousness of Gilliam’s work—on the multitude of ways he has applied and manipulated paint and other materials in a spirit Thelma Golden describes as his “refusal to be confined to a particular type of art production.” The current Gilliam exhibition on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin is not extensive—23 works on canvas and paper, all but one from the 1990s—but it illuminates an aspect of Gilliam’s oeuvre that has not been much noticed until now: the use of sewing in his practice. While Gilliam often worked on a vast scale to create works best appreciated from a certain distance, the unstretched, sewn, or quilted paintings here may be large, but with their richly detailed surfaces they invite viewers to come close. Each piece is an irregular patchwork-like assemblage of variously painted, stained, and printed pieces of canvas held together by very visible machine stitching. Particularly surprising, given Gilliam’s association with pure abstraction, is the presence of printed photographic imagery, mostly of only vaguely identifiable botanical forms, in several of the works. But most fascinating of all, to my eye, is how the stitching itself not only holds the various parts of the paintings together, but becomes a way of drawing—something usually just tacit in Gilliam’s art, implied by the meeting of two edges, but here an added element that can be frankly, and joyfully, ornamental.

An explanation for these works’ appearance in Ireland is that the country is part of their origin story: Traveling to a residency in Ballinglen, County Mayo, in 1993, Gilliam realized that the petroleum-based paints he was using could not be shipped there, so he worked on some canvases in his Washington studio in advance, then sent them to Ballinglen, where he set about cutting them up and having a seamstress sew them together. The results turned out to be brilliant. These paintings find a sweet spot in Gilliam’s oeuvre: stitched together, these rippling, looped sheets of color are more strictly constructed than the earlier works using single long rolls of raw canvas.

Still, they feel freer than the paintings in which various pieces of canvas are affixed to rigid supports or stretchers. The art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has convincingly argued that in the latter works, though they do not literally employ sewing, “Gilliam definitively pays homage to ‘women’s work’ in quilt-like paintings” thanks to “their recall of the handcrafted labors of stitching and sewing, their use of a domestic tool for the cleaning and maintenance of carpets, and their frank acknowledgment of the canvas support as another textile.” But the sewn-together unstretched paintings featured in “Sewing Fields” make the acknowledgements and homages far more explicit than in any of Gilliam’s other work. As luck would have it, such a lineage becomes especially patent at IMMA because one of the other exhibitions concurrently on view is of Gee’s Bend quilts. Gilliam himself, as I learned from John Beardsley’s essay for the “Sewing Fields” catalog, owned two Gee’s Bend quilts—“surely a sign that for him,” says Beardsley, “the hierarchical distinction between art and craft… was all but effaced.”

Gilliam, you might say, loved distinctions but hated hierarchies. His works ask us to focus on the distinctive quiddity of each element in the multiplicities he kept gathering—to see them and feel the rightness of their being there on a level of equality. Did he want us to draw a lesson from this? Hard to say. Our culture places representational demands on Black artists that Gilliam refused to fulfill. He was unusually tight-lipped about most aspects of his aesthetic thinking beyond his fascination with materials and their untapped potential. Or as the critic Lilly Wei once politely put it in this magazine, he was “courteous but elusive,” not only about race, but about subject matter in general. I think that had to do with an idea about freedom—the idea that art should give you something to think about, not tell you what to think about it. As this exhibition suggests, we still have lots of thinking to do. And as it clearly demonstrates, Gilliam’s multifarious oeuvre is rich with little-known aspects. When will we see the full-scale retrospective that will sew all the pieces together?