Artist Sam Gilliam (American, 1933–2022)
Title Untitled
Date 1972–1975
Medium Watercolor on paper
Dimensions Sight: 14 1/4 × 12 5/8 × 1 in. (36.2 × 32.1 × 2.5 cm)
Framed: 19 × 16 × 2 in. (48.3 × 40.6 × 5.1 cm)
Credit Line Gift of Second Baptist Church, Bloomington, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2006.520
About this Work
Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He recieved his B.A in 1956 and his M.A. in 1961, both from the University of Louisville. Although he began as a figurative painter, his move to Washington, DC, in 1962 introduced him to the work of Washington Color School artists, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Gilliam quickly embraced their technique of pouring paint directly onto raw, unstretched canvases. This methodology liberated him from the confines of canvas and brush painting and enabled him to create his revolutionary drape paintings, which he said were inspired by the laundry hanging outside his studio.
To make these works, Gilliam dyed canvases using aniline dyes mixed with acrylic paint and displayed them, without stretchers, draped from walls and ceilings in a haphazard fashion. In 1972 he created a miniature, watercolor version of his drape paintings as a gift to his brother Clarence and his sister-in-law Frances's Bloomington, Indiana, church. Despite its small scale and some fading, this work captures the lyrical abstraction that characterizes Gilliam's style.
