At a time when many Black artists turned to figuration, Gilliam harnessed the power of abstraction, freeing the canvas from its support.
Sam Gilliam
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When Abstraction Exploded in Form and Meaning
Can non-representational art reflect social change?
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Sam Gilliam’s Tactile Choreography of Colors
For six decades, Gilliam’s colors have swirled on canvases, his practice levitating above categorizations. For his latest exhibition, the artist has created what he calls a “dance” between three new bodies of work.
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In Baltimore, Generations Traces a Lineage of Abstraction Among Black Artists
Most shows can’t or don’t hold these very separate aspects in synchronous rotation: sober assessment of an art historical lineage and a feeling of intimacy. This one does.
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Basking in Sam Gilliam’s Endless Iterations
The artist — still brilliant and brimming with artistic talent — will celebrate his 86th birthday on November 30.
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Can This Sam Gilliam Drawing Reveal Your Opinion of Trump?
A new poll seems to reveal a correlation between support of President Donald Trump and how harshly one judges the artist’s 1980 study “Coffee Thyme.”
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The Colors of the Sixties
Spilling Over: Painting in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum expands the common understanding of a pivot point in American art, while basking unapologetically in the pure pleasure of looking.
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A Black Painter Who Found Aesthetic Liberty in the 1960s
LOS ANGELES — At first sight of the Green April exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, it is fairly obvious that Sam Gilliam is a marvelous painter who is sensitive to color and hue, shade and saturation, and able to create vibrantly interstitial zones where an object is not quite itself and not yet something else.
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Tracing the Contours of Power at the Marrakech Biennale
MARRAKESH — In the vaults adjacent to the city’s Koutoubia Mosque, a video by the Copenhagen-based artists’ group Superflex tells the story of migrants and refugees eager to reach Europe.
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At the Marrakech Biennale, a Conversation Between Postcolonial Identities
MARRAKESH — Set outside the institutional white cube, in restored ancient sites and the ruins of a 16th-century palace, the sixth edition of the Marrakech Biennale, Not New Now, arrives like a breath of fresh air.
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Beer with a Painter: Sam Gilliam
“I’m just getting started,” Sam Gilliam says with a playful smile as he watches me take in his Washington, D.C. studio.
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Subversive Color at the Rose Art Museum
WALTHAM, Mass. — To say that painting is having a moment would be ironic – since, despite periodic claims regarding its demise or return, it clearly never went very far away.