Currently on view at Atlanta Contemporary through December 23 is a stunning exhibition of works by Sam Gilliam (1933-2022). They were chosen from private collections in Atlanta and curated by Veronica Kessenich, the Contemporary’s departing director, to mark its 50th anniversary.
This a celebratory collection of paintings seen together for the first time. Many of the collectors were introduced to Gilliam by Atlanta artist Kevin Cole, to whom Gilliam was a mentor.
Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, during the era of the Jim Crow South. In 1962, after moving to Washington, D.C., he emerged as a second-generation artist of the Washington Color School indebted to the paintings of Morris Louis, though they never met as the elder artist died in1962.
Gilliam’s folded and stained paintings, which he draped on gallery walls and in many public spaces around the United States, including in Atlanta — Triple Variants (2009) is at the Richard Russell Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse — took a radical approach to the rectangular flat surface of traditional painting.
In this exhibition at the Contemporary, the folded raw canvas work Atlanta (2003) spreads across the wall like a giant wing, creating an arc of sumptuous color, much like the phoenix rising from the ashes on the city’s official seal.
This canvas, hung on the gallery wall with grommets, is a symphony of colors that have been poured and stained, acrylic paint drenching the viewer’s eye with hues that span from deep blues to vibrant reds to verdant greens. Atlanta is from the collection of Greg Head, who has said of this work: “For me its spectrum of colors mimics the rainbow. It represents both inclusivity and endless possibilities . . .”
“Endless possibilities” describes the way Gilliam pursued making art. His works could be on any surface, in any medium. For Gilliam, an African American, making art was a political act. Living and working in Washington, D.C., in 1962, he witnessed the signing of the Civil Rights Act into law by President Lyndon Johnson (1964) and the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War (1969) that took place at the Lincoln Memorial, not far from his home.
Yet Gilliam was an abstractionist, and there is always a question about how political ideas can be expressed in abstract art. Throughout his life, Gilliam was an activist in his work, and abstraction was the nail on which he hung his political and social ideas. His draped painting in MoMA’s collection, currently on view in New York, is simply titled April 4, leaving it to the viewer to remember that is the date on which the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In these abstract paintings, the viewer must consider the context to attain a full reading of the artwork. In this way, Gilliam broke the boundaries of abstraction and representation.
Gilliam always sought a new language for painting that straddled a two-dimensional surface and a sculptural presentation. One of the most powerful works in the exhibition, the unique and immersive Two Aspects for the Heads (1999), acrylic and medium on panel, has flowing colors on painted wood, with hinged side panels that reference altarpieces without invoking figurative or religious connotations.
This painting is simultaneously fearlessly inventive and iconic. Using wooden panels as his substrate allows Gilliam to escape the square canvas. The liquid paint applied to the wood surface contains a spectrum of color. In this hinged and notched painting, each passage of paint has unpredictable movement and flow yet also has a clear relationship to the whole. The title is a curious one: Is the artist referring to the structures that support the different parts of the brain?
A pair of paintings, Watercourse and Castle (1991) are like two sculptural parentheses, hung just slightly askew and kitty corner to one another, covered with a textured pattern in the paint. The striations within the paint of these intensely colored geometric compositions have a strong physicality and presence; one can see the process of the physical making of these paintings. The way these two panels echo one another creates a teetering balance between them and a dialogue on the wall of the gallery. They are asymmetrical and yet balanced in a way that is completely satisfying to the viewer.
Gilliam challenges the framework of painting as an illusionistic window by rupturing the rectangle in these works. Each exemplifies the clarity of his experimentation with veils of color. Paintings that are hung, ripped and draped radically change the viewers’ physical and emotional space.
Gilliam is a formalist, yet his abstract paintings are imbued with the life of an artist seeking political and artistic change. For Gilliam, the most personal act of creating his art was always political.
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Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer. She is known internationally for large-scale installations that have covered the sides of buildings from Atlanta to Venice, Italy. Her book, She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue (2013), is a critical yet intimate look at the lives and work of nine noted American women artists who have been personally important to Sirlin, based on conversations with each one.
