Sam Gilliam

Pace Prints is pleased to present Sam Gilliam: Make It Wonderful, an exhibition of monoprints by Sam Gilliam (1933–2022). This exhibition focuses on thirteen large-scale monoprints that Sam Gilliam created in 2021 at the Brandywine Workshop and Archives.

Sam Gilliam’s legacy as a pioneer in postwar American art reaches well beyond the movement of Color-Field Painting of which he was an integral part of in the mid-1960s in Washington, DC. Gilliam was an innovator, and throughout his life and work he was driven by a strong predisposition toward material experimentation. He changed the course of abstract expressionist art when he released the canvas from its stretcher to create his first iconic drape paintings in 1965. Gilliam was a master at manipulating print material and brought his relentless experimentation into any workshop. In his later work, Gilliam engaged digital technology to assist in the printmaking process, including thirteen large-scale monoprints on view at Pace Prints which he made in collaboration with Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia.

Brandywine is a nonprofit organization established to produce limited-edition screenprints. As their first artist-in-residence in 1975, Sam Gilliam became involved in growing and supporting their initiatives. Later, as a member of the board, Gilliam cemented this important creative partnership that spanned decades.

Make it Wonderful presents one of the last projects produced from this collaboration before Gilliam’s passing in 2022. Pulled from a single watercolor painting, the color areas were digitally separated into three values: light, medium, and dark, to produce a series of what Giliam referred to as “emphatic black and white prints.” Using oil-based lithography ink the monoprints were created from maple wood blocks milled with a computer numerical control (CNC) router.

Gilliam described the importance of tactility in his process:

“When you run your hand across the surface, you can feel how it is made... A blind person is the one who sees.”

Though the works were made in Brandywine’s workshop, the pieces traveled back and forth to Sam Gilliam’s studio in Washington DC where he would implement changes, including a pivot away from grayscale toward reviving earlier color concepts. The variations, from marbled texture to a spectrum of bright diptychs, to black and white works elevated with silver ink, are anchored by complex additive and subtractive qualities.

By rearranging the sequence of blocks and color, Gilliam experimented with endless combinations concluding in vastly different images, some composed of over twenty layers. The result is an exemplary use of innovative technology in printmaking that expanded upon the possibility of what could be done without compromising the will of the artist. These monoprints are guided by Gilliam’s vision, and the expertise of the printmakers who articulated it.

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; d. 2022, Washington D.C.) was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting.

A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Sam Gilliam was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018), among many other institutions. A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings opened at Dia:Beacon in August 2019. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago.