The present work belonged to the Collection of William Weege, a longtime friend and collaborator of Sam Gilliam. An artist, educator, and influential figure in the fields of papermaking and printmaking, Weege received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1970 before joining his alma mater’s Art Department faculty in 1971. Weege and Gilliam first met through the university’s visiting artist program in 1972, and a year later Weege would print Gilliam’s works for the first time through his Jones Road Print Shop and Stable in Barneveld, Wisconsin, which later became the Off Jones Road Press. When Weege established the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s renowned Tandem Press in 1987, Sam Gilliam was the first artist invited to create prints with the studio.
I'd actually say that your ideas come from the art collective, those artists that you've always been interested in and figuring out what they would do in those situations. That's what an artist is anyway. He's just a single member of a collective, the whole generation that went before.
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam 1933–2022
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1933, Sam Gilliam was a major innovator of post-war American painting who, as David Kordansky Gallery described it, “elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting.” Gilliam is perhaps best known today for his draped paintings, an unprecedented formal pivot that he made in the mid-1960s. These twisting lengths of stretcher-less canvas completely dispensed with the traditional framed picture plane, instead proposing abstract painting as a sculptural endeavor.
One of eight siblings, Gilliam was passionate about drawing and cartooning from a young age. Gilliam attended the University of Louisville, where, in 1955, he received his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts as part of the school’s second class of Black undergraduate students. After two years of military service from 1956 to 1958, Gilliam returned to the university and earned Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 1961.
Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962 following his marriage to Dorothy Butler, a Louisville native who was the first African American woman to be hired as a reporter with the Washington Post. It was here that he made the first color-stained, stretcher-less works that would become his most famous works. As his reputation grew, Gilliam maintained solidarity with the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, boycotting the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 in support of a protest spearheaded by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. A year later, he became the first African American artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale.
Shortly after completing one of his most monumental draped works – Seahorses at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – in 1975, Gilliam moved away from this style of working, choosing to pursue other forms with influences that included the improvisational approach of jazz music and African patchwork quilting. Today, Gilliam’s works are included in numerous institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago.**
