Sam Gilliam is one of the great, game-changing American abstract painters of postwar art. His ethos was centered around pushing boundaries and experimentation. While he observed that Jackson Pollock put his canvas on the ground, Gilliam thought he could do better and took his paintings off the stretcher entirely, suspending them from the ceiling in what would become his iconic series of abstract Drape paintings. Working as a Black artist in Washington, DC, during the height of the civil rights movement, his radical approach was not merely a rethinking of aesthetics but, in Gilliam’s own words, making work that is “as political as it is formal.”
–Yuri Stone, from the Glenstone Field Guide