Sam Gilliam

African American painter Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) is internationally recognized as one of the foremost painters associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Color Field style painters practicing in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s. The Color Field style was an important development in abstract art that emerged after 1950s to totally nonrepresentational, simplified works of bright colors in the 1960s.

Gilliam’s participation in the Color Field movement was motivated in part by his reaction to the art of his African American contemporaries, much of which was strictly representational and was intended to convey explicit political statements. Gilliam found their approach to be aesthetically conservative: the message was unmistakable, he felt, and there in particular. In this he represented a view that was then rare among African American artists.

Gilliam’s highly experimental paintings epitomized his refusal to conform to the public’s expectation that African American artists produce explicitly political art. His early experiments included pouring paint onto stained canvases and folding canvases over onto themselves. Then around 1965 Gilliam became the first painter to introduce the idea of the unsupported canvas. creation of moods that would allow these emotions and tensions to be felt by all audiences.