How Sam Gilliam Turned Portray into Sculpture

Throughout the sixty-odd years of his profession as a painter, Sam Gilliam was as relentless an experimenter as could be imagined. Born within the Jim Crow South in 1933, he ultimately settled in Washington, DC, the place he remained till his demise in 2022. When he began out, within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Gilliam made intensely hued hard-edged stripe work not dissimilar to these of considerably older Washingtonians akin 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. In reality, I’d argue that he’d begun making polychrome sculpture out of the supplies of portray.

These unstretched canvas items cut up the distinction between Colour Area portray and Submit-Minimalism. As such, they have been in sync with the contemporaneous post-painting experiments of New York artists akin to Lynda Benglis, Concord Hammond, Alvin Loving, and Howardena Pindell—lots of whom featured within the eye-opening 2006–07 touring exhibition “Excessive Instances, Onerous Instances: New York Portray 1967–1975.” That collection made Gilliam’s title (he represented the US in Venice in 1972) and he created comparable works recurrently through the years, however his investigations didn’t cease there. Within the Eighties he returned to the aircraft, however with work collaged from cut-up items of usually thickly painted canvas mounted to inflexible backgrounds, completely defiant of the traditional pictorial rectangle and typically, a la Frank Stella, constructed in aid. 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 sort of artwork manufacturing.” The present Gilliam exhibition on view on the Irish Museum of Fashionable Artwork (IMMA) in Dublin just isn’t in depth—23 works on canvas and paper, all however one from the Nineties—however it illuminates a side of Gilliam’s oeuvre that has not been a lot seen till now: the usage of stitching in his observe. Whereas Gilliam usually labored on an enormous scale to create works greatest 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. Significantly shocking, given Gilliam’s affiliation with pure abstraction, is the presence of printed photographic imagery, largely 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 means of drawing—one thing often simply tacit in Gilliam’s artwork, implied by the assembly of two edges, however right here an added component that may be frankly, and joyfully, decorative.

A proof 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 reducing them up and having a seamstress sew them collectively. The outcomes turned out to be good. These work discover a candy spot in Gilliam’s oeuvre: stitched collectively, these rippling, looped sheets of colour are extra strictly constructed than the sooner works utilizing single lengthy rolls of uncooked canvas.

Nonetheless, they really feel freer than the work through 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 ‘girls’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 express 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—“certainly an indication that for him,” says Beardsley, “the hierarchical distinction between artwork and craft… was all however effaced.”

Gilliam, you would possibly say, cherished distinctions however hated hierarchies. His works ask us to deal with the distinctive quiddity of every component 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? Onerous to say. Our tradition locations representational calls for on Black artists that Gilliam refused to meet. He was unusually tight-lipped about most facets of his aesthetic considering 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 concept about freedom—the concept that artwork ought to provide you with one thing to consider, not let you know what to consider it. As this exhibition suggests, we nonetheless have a number of considering to do. And because it clearly demonstrates, Gilliam’s multifarious oeuvre is wealthy with little-known facets. When will we see the full-scale retrospective that can sew all of the items collectively?