With an artistic career spanning more than six decades, abstract painter Sam Gilliam continually pushed the boundaries of color and form. Associated with the Washington Color School movement, it was in the early 1960s when Gilliam began staining unprimed and unstretched canvases with diluted acrylic paint rather than using traditional brushstroke techniques. By the end of the 1960s, he started experimenting with crumpling, folding, and draping these canvases before arranging them in site-specific spaces or wrapping them around variably shaped framed stretchers to dispense a more sculptural approach. The malleability of these canvases echoes the fluidity of the paint and vice versa. A quintessential work, “A” and the Carpenter I is a painting on a grand scale, and yet, like a stained drop cloth slung across two sawhorses, it evokes a snapshot of the artist’s studio.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Walter Hopps, Sam Gilliam: Paintings and Works on Paper (Louisville: J.B. Speed Art Museum, 1976), n.p., cat. 10 (ill.).
Kay Kloner, Hugh M. Davies, Sam Gilliam: Indoor & Outdoor Paintings, 1967-1978, exh. cat. (Amherst: University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1978), 2, 17.
Jay Kloner, “Sam Gilliam: Recent Black Paintings,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 6 (February 1978): 152, as A and the Carpenter I.
Susan F. Rossen, “Introduction,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), 141.
Jonathan P. Binstock, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press/Washington DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2005), 46, 92, 94, 97 (color ill.), 113.
Lilly Wei, “Living Color,” Art in America 95, no. 4 (April 2007): 119, as A and the Carpenter I (1973).
Jonathan P. Binstock and Josef Helfenstein, eds., The Music of Color: Sam Gilliam, 1967–1973, exh. cat. (Köln: Verlag Walther König, 2018), 72-73 (color ill.), 143.
Janelle Porter, Sam Gilliam (Los Angeles: David Kordansky Gallery, 2016), 30.
Adrienne Edwards, Sam Gilliam: 1967-1973 (New York: Mnuchin Gallery, 2017), 69 (color ill., install).
Ishmael Reed, Mary Schmidt Campbell, and Andria Hickey, Sam Gilliam (New York, London: Phaidon Press, 2024), 123, 124-125 (color ill.), 298.
Washington, D. C., Corcoran Museum of Art, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, Oct. 15, 2005–Jan. 22, 2006, no cat. no.; Louisville, Speed Art Museum, June 6–Sept. 3; Savannah, Telfair Museums, Jepson Center, Oct. 11–Dec. 31, 2006; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, Jan. 27–May 6, 2006.
Kunstmuseum Basel, The Music of Color: Sam Gilliam, 1967–1973, June 9–Sept. 30, 2018, cat. 17.
The artist; Washington D.C.; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, June 12, 1973.
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