Sam Gilliam Print Traveling Exhibition

SAM GILLIAM:
HIS ART OF PRINTMAKING

From the Michael K. & Marian E. Butler Collection

Exhibition Essay by Bruce Weber

National Museum Tour
2024-2027

Organized by

- Illustrated List of Works - Gilliam CV - Exhibition Essay -
- Schedule - Exhibition Details - Contact -

- A New Traveling Exhibition -

SAM GILLIAM:
HIS ART OF PRINTMAKING

SAM GILLIAM: HIS ART OF PRINTMAKING is now available for circulation through 2027. Featured are 37 of Gilliam's finest prints done between 1972 and 2009. The prints come from the Michael K. and Marian E. Butler Collection of Miami, FL. The exhibition includes an essay by art historian Bruce Weber examining Gilliam and his 4 decades of printmaking.

In 1970s, Gilliam’s innovations brought a new vibrancy to abstraction. He and his art have been variously associated styles and movements such as geometric and lyrical abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and the Washington Color Field School, yet Gilliam’s production is singular.

Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and soon thereafter his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky. Gilliam completed his Bachelors of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Louisville where his first solo exhibition was held.

Sam Gilliam was one the great innovators in postwar American painting. Early in his career, he made clean-edged abstractions, in line with the Washington Color School painters such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. He gradually loosened up his style, soaking or pouring colors directly onto his canvases and folding them before they dried—a technique which created accordion lines and a deep sense of texture. Around 1965, he made his greatest stylistic innovation: He got rid of the stretcher bars that traditionally underpin a painting and draped his canvases from the wall like sheets from a clothesline.

Sam Gilliam with master printer Lou Stovall
with whom he worked for over 40 years.

Gilliam began his printmaking in the 1970s where he was encouraged to work in the area between painting and prints, sculpture and prints. He would occasionally use traditional techniques such as screenprinting, but would also take his prints back to the studio, cut them apart and stitch them back together with a heavy nylon filament resulting in a series of highly innovative and unique works.

Selected Works

Dance (Purple), 1978,
Serigraph, 42 x 28 in.

Prelude to New Columbia, 1994,
Silkscreen, 37 x 29 in.

For Xavier, 1990, Serigraph,
32 1/5 x 40 1/8 in.

Think Tank, Serigraph, 1996
40 x 44 in.

Museum Moment, 2009
Serigraph, 32 x 40 in.

In 1972 Gilliam became the first black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 2005.

His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; and many others.

Bruce Weber is an independent art historian. He has served as a curator at a number of institutions, including the Norton Museum of Art, the National Academy Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, as well as Director of Research and Exhibitions at a leading gallery of American art in New York City. Dr. Weber has written about a wide ranging group of artists and topics, and recently about the African American engraver, painter and watercolorist Norma Morgan.

The exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA in association with the Griots Gallery, Miami, FL.