Roberta Smith for The New York Times

Sam Gilliam, a pioneering abstract painter best known for his lusciously stained Drape paintings, which took his medium more fully into three-dimensions than any other artist of his generation, died on Saturday at his home in Washington. He was 88.

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Michael O'Sullivan for The Washington Post

Sam Gilliam, a Washington artist who helped redefine abstract painting by liberating canvas from its traditional framework and shaking it loose in lavish, paint-spattered folds cascading from ceilings, stairwells and other architectural elements, died June 25 at his home in the District. He was 88.

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"The title of Hemphill Artworks’ “What’s Going Around: Lou Stovall & the Community Poster” gives the longtime D.C. printmaker top billing. But the show includes pieces by other notables who squeegeed ink across silk-screens at Workshop Inc., the studio Stovall founded in 1968. These include Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis and Paul Reed, as well as Stovall’s frequent collaborator, artist-musician Lloyd McNeill, and his spouse, artist Di Stovall."

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Curated by Jack Rasmussen

American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington DC

February 16 – August 9, 2021

"The American University Museum recently acquired 9,000 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Washington institution that closed its doors to the public in 2014. Together with our Watkins Collection we have an especially strong cache of works by Washington regional artists. While curating a show of Washington paintings drawn from our growing collections, I became interested in how my memories of a formative time in my life might be affecting my choice of artwork for this exhibition.

Every exhibition is an opportunity to address what we can see of the past from our contemporary perspective. My perspective includes the acknowledgement of persistent, systemic gender and racial injustice, bias, and violence that was present in the fifties, laid bare in the sixties, and continues to the present day. It is clear to me that the defining characteristic of most White mainstream art made between 1957 and 1982 in Washington was an adherence to aesthetic and commercial constraints that encouraged artists to remain silent when their voices are most needed. What pushback there was against this tendency was led by Black and women artists, whose work has been systematically underrepresented in the collections of Washington museums."

– Jack Rasmussen, Curator

Featuring Artists: Cynthia Bickley-Green, Lisa Montag Brotman, Allen Carter, Michael Clark, Manon Cleary, Robert D’Arista, Rebecca Davenport, Gene Davis, Willem de Looper, Jeff Donaldson, Thomas Downing, William S. Dutterer, Alan Feltus, Fred Folsom, Robert Franklin Gates, Sam Gilliam, Carol Brown Goldberg, Tom Green, Helene McKinsey Herzbrun, Michal Hunter, Val Lewton, Howard Mehring, William Newman, Kenneth Noland, Robin Rose, Joseph Shannon, Frank Anthony Smith, Carroll Sockwell, Alma Thomas, Franklin White, William Woodward, and Kenneth Victor Young.

View the exhibition and catalogue online in Museum@Home.

Written by Darla Harper for Artsy.

"The story of abstraction in America has long featured an overwhelmingly white cast of characters, but in recent decades, that has finally started to change...Recent years have seen swelling recognition for important Black Abstract Expressionists like Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, and subsequent generations of artists including Edward Clark, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Stanley Whitney, and Jack Whitten."

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Learn more about Sam Gilliam's work in How to Read Sam Gilliam's Formalism in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl.

"For decades, the artist has made meltingly beautiful paintings that appeared to make no clear point about identity, but the scholar Fred Moten teases out inconspicuous themes of Blackness."

Read "How to read Sam Gilliam's Formalism" here.