Sam Gilliam (American, 1933-2022) Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, Sam Gilliam was an original and innovative color field painter. Beginning in the 1960s, he advanced the inventions associated with the Washington Color School and took Abstract Expressionism to a new level. Renowned for his innovative Drape series, in which lengths of painted canvas were removed from the stretcher and suspended from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam continuously explored and reinvented his ideas about making art in a variety of styles, forms, and media.

One of the most important African American artists of the twentieth century, Gilliam was the subject of a major retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2005. His recent works debuted in 2022 at the exhibit Sam Gilliam: Full Circle at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. His artwork is held in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), Tate (London), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).