Sam Gilliam: Full Circle

In the 60 years he lived in Washington, DC, Sam Gilliam produced a prolific body of abstraction across media through which he continually pursued new avenues of artistic expression. He initially rose to prominence in the late 1960s, making large, color-stained, manipulated, unstretched canvases. Gilliam continued to experiment with staining, soaking, and pouring pigments, elaborating on the process-oriented tradition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and other Washington Color School artists. In 1972, Gilliam represented the United States at the 36th Venice Biennale, and he returned in 2017 with Yves Klein Blue, a draped work that welcomed visitors to the Venice Giardini. Gilliam’s approach focused keenly on the cornerstones of abstraction—form, color, and material—from which he created artworks that reflect his career-long engagement with art history and the improvisatory ethos of jazz. Full Circle showed Gilliam’s most recent works in recognition of his indefatigable vision, presented in his chosen hometown on the National Mall at the national museum of modern and contemporary art.

This exhibition reflected Gilliam’s tireless propulsion of the throughlines of abstraction. His new round paintings (or tondos) expanded the body of beveled-edge abstract paintings that Gilliam first pioneered in the 1960s. Ranging from 3 to 5 feet in diameter, each tondo begins with a beveled wood panel, which the artist loaded with layers of dense, vibrant pigments, their aggregate effect heightened through the addition of thickening agents, sawdust, shimmering metal fragments, wood scraps, and other studio debris. Using a stiff metal rake along with more traditional tools, Gilliam then abraded, smeared, and scraped the coarse surfaces to reveal a constellation of textures and colors below.

Gilliam’s 2021 works were shown alongside Rail (1977), a stellar “Black” painting by Gilliam in the Hirshhorn’s collection that marks some of the artist’s earliest experiments with pronounced materiality. With its immense scale (it is more than 15 feet long), stained underpinning, pieced canvas structure, and deep tones, Rail offered a resonant counterpoint.

“I am greatly looking forward to premiering this new body of work,” Gilliam said before the exhibition opened. “The tondo series introduced in this show encapsulates many of the ideas that I have been developing throughout my career. Just as importantly, they reflect my current thinking about color, materials, and space. These spaces determined by color and texture are limitless.”

Sam Gilliam: Full Circle was organized by Head Curator Evelyn Hankins.

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For six decades, Gilliam (1933–2022; b. Tupelo, Mississippi) created groundbreaking work in a range of media. After earning his Bachelor of Arts (1955) and Master of Fine Arts (1961) from the University of Louisville in Kentucky, he moved to Washington in 1962 and lived and worked there to the end of his life. Gilliam’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows at institutions and biennials such as Tate Modern, London; the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dia Beacon, New York; the Venice Biennale; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, among others. His work is held in the collections of major museums worldwide, including the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.