July, 2026

Sam Gilliam: “I paint what it feels like to be alive”

By Janie Welker
Contributing Writer

Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and spent the majority of his art-making years living and working in Washington, D.C. However, Kentucky — where his family eventually made their home — claims the artist as one of its own.

The seventh of eight children born to Sam Sr. and Estery Gilliam, young Sam had dreams of becoming a cartoonist, spending much of his childhood sketching. “Almost all of my family members used their hands to create,” he told art historian and curator Jonathan Binstock. “In this atmosphere of construction, I too began to flourish.”

The Gilliam family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942 when Sam was seven years old; he attended all segregated schools until he entered college. His mother was a schoolteacher and homemaker, and his father put his hand to a number of professions, from farming to carpentry. Gilliam attended art enrichment programs in middle school, but his high school did not offer art classes. After he graduated from Central High in 1951, Gilliam joined only the second class of Black students admitted to the University of Louisville, where he was mentored by several professors and went onto earn a B.A. in painting.

In some cases, it is possible to trace the course of an artist’s career by the type of subject matter chosen or materials used in specific periods, but Gilliam’s trajectory through art and life was never an orderly progression. He saw opportunity in an infinite number of materials and continued experimenting with different techniques or going back to revive older ones. He might scrunch and fold a sheet of Japanese paper and paint it with vibrant watercolors, as in the painting Annie, from 2022. Even when the painting had been flattened, mounted and traditionally framed, it reveals the story of its making in ridges and creases that seem almost topographical. In his Slice series, the artist cut into the canvas of paintings and mounted them on beveled stretchers, with the gaping incisions once again playing against traditional ideas of displaying art. 

Gilliam is probably best known for his decision to free paintings from the traditional presentation in frames in order to paint swaths of cotton material — sometimes as long as 70 feet — that he used to create fluid sculptural installations that varied in form according to the space in which he was installing it. He rejected the idea that sculpture needed to be constructed of traditional materials like metal or stone. The unstructured form of the Drape paintings allowed individual works to be installed in a variety of ways over time. Double Merge, pictured here, is a good example. While it was painted and first shown in 1968, this photograph is of a far later installation at Dia Beacon Art Museum in New York's Hudson Valley in 2019, demonstrating the work’s adaptability to different spaces over time.

The artist was inspired by and experimented with a wide range of art forms and movements over the years. While earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Louisville, he became a studio assistant to professor Ulfert Wilke, who introduced him to his own collections of woodcut prints, African sculpture, and art by the Swiss-born painter and printmaker Paul Klee, who was deeply interested in color theory and worked in a very personal, idiosyncratic style. Ulfert also introduced Gilliam to German Expressionism, which inspired the young artist to make a series of dark figurative paintings, black on black, with thick, expressive brushwork.

Following his undergraduate work at the University of Louisville, Gilliam served in the United States Army in Yokohama, Japan, from 1956 to 1958, and used the opportunity to familiarize himself with the art scene there. He visited American architect Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel (since demolished) and learned about the avant garde Gutai Art Association, whose radical work anticipated later art movements, including performance and conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s in this country. When he was honorably discharged from the army in 1958, he returned to the University of Louisville and earned a master’s degree in painting. 

Even before his time in the army, Gilliam was involved in a relationship with the journalist Dorothy Butler. While he was in graduate school in Louisville, Butler was earning a master’s degree at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, where the artist would visit her and take in the latest gallery exhibitions. At 24, she became the first Black woman to be hired as a reporter for The Washington Post. They married in 1962, and her new position prompted their move to the city, whose art scene was transforming in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. He and Butler participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in August 1963, but Gilliam became disenchanted with participation in political protest and stopped participating over time.