Latest news with #SamGilliam
The Guardian
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘If there's a rule, he tries to break it': the explosively colourful textiles of Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam's artistic life was bookended by success against the odds. In 1972, he became the first Black artist to represent the US at the world's most prestigious art festival, the Venice Biennale. He had overcome poverty and prejudice in the south to study art at one of the first desegregated universities, and, after settling in Washington, was hailed as a radical innovator within the group of abstract painters dubbed the Color School. Pushing his medium in new sculptural directions, he broke convention by taking his canvases off their wooden stretchers. His best-known colour-drenched works have an improvisatory quality, never installed the same way twice, whether they're draped on the wall or hung tent-like from the ceiling. When the art world turned away from abstraction in the following decades, however, he was all but forgotten. He was approaching 80 in 2012 when the young art star Rashid Johnson championed his work, curating an exhibition that led to a fresh slate of big international shows and museum recognition. Yet as Gilliam said in an interview two years before his death in 2022, in art, 'Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But I've never lost entirely. We just keep on keeping on.' Sewing Fields, a new exhibition featuring unseen work from Gilliam's residency at the Ballinglen Art Foundation on the west coast of Ireland in 1993, reveals how he never stopped making and innovating. 'He was so prolific,' says the show's co-curator, Mary Cremin. 'There's still a huge amount of his work that's never been shown.' One of the biggest surprises is that he worked in Ireland at all. The isolated rural location with its sea cliffs and rolling hills must have been a major change for an artist who spent his life in cosmopolitan Washington's creative community. He wasn't afraid of mixing things up, though. Prohibited from flying across the Atlantic with petrol-based paints, he was compelled to paint, print and dye materials in his Washington studio in advance, and pursue new processes in Ireland. It resulted in a fresh approach with cut-up collaged fragments of paintings including screen-printed cloth and paper and material thick with paint. 'Needs must is the mother of invention,' says the curator. It was the experience of being captivated by laundry billowing on a line that first led Gilliam to set the canvas free from wooden stretchers to create his characteristic draped works. His approach to painting was expansive, underlining art's connection to lowly cloth while nodding to histories of Black female labour. In Ireland, he worked with a seamstress to stitch his layered compositions of collaged painted fabrics with distinct zigzagging lines of thread. 'He supposedly had six sewing machines in his Ballinglen studio,' says Cremin. She points out that Ireland's light and unpredictable weather fed into Gilliam's explosive use of colour, too. 'The sky changes, the seasons change in a single day,' says Cremin. 'In these works, the tone changes all the time.' One reason given for Gilliam's art-world wilderness years is that, during the rise of identity politics in the 1980s, his work didn't foreground Black experience. Today, it's his commitment to constant experimentation within his medium that the curator sees as crucial to his legacy for younger artists. Says Cremin: 'If there's a rule, he tries to break it.' Folded Cottage II, 1993This kickstarted the experimental body of work Gilliam produced on Ireland's west coast and, as the title suggests, it took formal inspiration from its coastal dwellings. There're all kinds of painterly techniques on the fragments he collaged, including stained and splashed paint, as well as his signature method of raking lines in pigment. Doonfeeny Lower, 1994Gilliam pushed painting into sculptural territory with works that spoke to the human body and the world beyond the gallery. With its loops of fabric across its top edge, this collaged painting looks almost wearable – or like curtains. The stitched lines of thread that hold the composition together crisscross like pencil marks. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Count on Us, 2008This dyed nylon trio is typical of Gilliam's key move as an artist: draped paintings that freed the fabric support from its traditional wooden stretcher. The buoyant palette channels the jubilation felt when Obama was elected in 2008. As the co-curator Mary Cremin points out, it's hard not to wonder what the Washington-based artist would have made of the current president. Silhouette/Template, 1994This is one of many later works that would be inspired by Gilliam's time in Ireland. Rippling across the wall like a kite or rolling hills, it's testament to the improvisatory nature of his work, in terms of the painting itself, and how it might change each time it's hung. 'It's unpredictable,' says Cremin. Pages and Echoes #8, 1998From primary hued paint spatters to deep moody mauves, this work pops with contrasting textures and tones. The handmade printed paper among the painted fabric, shows the influence of his sometime collaborator, the revered printmaker William Weege. Sewing Fields is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, to 25 January.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Columbia Museum of Art galleries are closed for renovations. What's upgrading?
In our Inside Look stories, The State's journalists take you inside places around South Carolina that you maybe haven't seen before. Read more. Story idea? statenews@ Last month, the Columbia Museum of Art marked its 75th anniversary. It met the milestone with its galleries closed. They've been closed since January, and they'll remain closed until May. 'The nonprofit has existed for 75 years, but we've been in this building for 25,' Executive Director Della Watkins said of the museum's home, which was built on the steel-frame bones of a Belk's department store. 'In the 25 years that we've been there, you know, just like in your home, there's always things you want to change and improve.' That's why the museum has pulled down the art from its walls, and torn up those walls and the ceilings above. The museum's ongoing, extensive renovations of all its main display galleries, six on the ground floor and 20 more upstairs, key on the need to upgrade the lighting for its art, which has reached the end of its operating life after 25 years in use. But the museum is doing more than simply hanging new lights. It's reworking and refreshing its galleries so they're a better space to see art, and it's expanding its capabilities to hang pieces that are heavy or otherwise challenging to display. And when the permanent collection galleries upstairs are ready for work to be reinstalled, there will be a thorough reshuffling of which pieces are displayed and how they're organized — some pieces will be put back in storage, while others will be put on display for the first time. Visitors will begin to see the results of the museum's $2.9 million upgrades May 24, when the rotating galleries downstairs reopen with an exhibition of works by innovative American printmaker Sam Gilliam. The return of the permanent collection is still a ways off, with the opening of the upstairs galleries not anticipated until January of next year. 'I'm not going to move it down the road,' Watkins said of that tentative date. 'I hope I'm moving up the road.' The State was invited along for a hard-hat tour of the in-progress renovations in late February to learn about how they will change the experience for museum visitors. It hasn't been too long since the museum last underwent a renovation, but it has been a while since most of its galleries were overhauled. The $5 million improvements the museum completed in 2018 did impact the way it displays art, as the push to expand into 11,000 square feet of unused space added both more areas for events and new galleries to increase the number of works displayed from the museum's permanent collection. This latest round of improvements is aimed squarely at the museum's ability to effectively display its art. Installing new lights is the primary emphasis. Controlling lighting — the amount and physical temperature each piece can take, the color temperature that best suits it — is vital. 'Every work of art has an ideal foot count, the amount of light that can stay on that piece of art,' Watkins said, explaining that the museum had previously been managing this by attaching lenses and baffles to diffuse and reduce the amount of light. But the heat put off by those bulbs limited the museum's capacity to display more sensitive works. After interviewing five lighting companies and testing their products in the gallery, the museum settled on new LED lights that can be easily adjusted via Bluetooth based on the requirements of each installation. 'You stand on the ground with your phone, and you can adjust it ... while somebody is on the lower level with the light meter,' Watkins said. And being able to so precisely control the light can help with the preservation of the art, Michael Neumeister, the museum's senior curator, said. 'These newer LEDs, of course, are much better, and you could really dial in the color temperature, purposefully, in a way that you couldn't before,' he said. 'The sentiment among conservators is that LED generates much less heat. You get much less UV band in there. So it'll definitely help.' The museum is upgrading the galleries in other ways, both planned and unexpected. Among the unanticipated improvement was properly pinning the HVAC ducts above the downstairs galleries instead of having them on the ceiling tiles, which is what crews discovered when they began work. 'We still don't know to this day how that passed all the right requirements, but it did 25 years ago,' Watkins laughed during the tour. One upgrade in the ceilings was more intentional. In seven spots, three in the downstairs galleries and four in the upstairs galleries, the museum has reinforced its ability to hang art from the ceiling. In these seven locations — three downstairs and four upstairs — it will soon be able to hang objects that weigh up to 1,000 pounds. 'Before this, we couldn't accept art that we had to hang at that level,' Watkins said. 'There were some cases where we did corner installations, and we kind of braced in the corner, but this is structurally sound for whatever needs to happen. It could be a big sculpture. It could be something out of wax, anything that has weight.' Another upgrade that will impact the viewing experience for museum guests is more subtle. Watkins pointed out how the walls in the downstairs may have looked like there was a wave to them, like they weren't quite level. That's because they weren't. Over the years, the gallery walls accrued 75 layers of paint as they were prepared again and again for new gallery displays. '25 years, three exhibitions a year, and we paint every time,' Watkins said. The layers upon layers of paint gradually made the walls uneven. Now, with new walls going in, the museum will have fresh hanging surfaces on which to install exhibitions. 'They had to break it off into, like, sheets,' Watkins said of the old paint. 'They were snapping it off. It was the weirdest sound, just snapping off all 75 layers of paint.'
