A new exhibition explores the late artist’s unexpected sojourn in Ireland, where practical constrictions and the wild scenery inspired a burst of fierce creativity
S
am Gilliam’s artistic life was bookended by success against the odds. In 1972, he became the first Black artist to represent the US at the world’s most prestigious art festival, the Venice Biennale. He had overcome poverty and prejudice in the south to study art at one of the first desegregated universities, and, after settling in Washington, was hailed as a radical innovator within the group of abstract painters dubbed the Color School.
Pushing his medium in new sculptural directions, he broke convention by taking his canvases off their wooden stretchers. His best-known colour-drenched works have an improvisatory quality, never installed the same way twice, whether they’re draped on the wall or hung tent-like from the ceiling.
When the art world turned away from abstraction in the following decades, however, he was all but forgotten. He was approaching 80 in 2012 when the young art star Rashid Johnson championed his work, curating an exhibition that led to a fresh slate of big international shows and museum recognition. Yet as Gilliam said in an interview two years before his death in 2022, in art, “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But I’ve never lost entirely. We just keep on keeping on.”
