Sam Gilliam was an American abstract artist who revolutionised the display of work in gallery spaces. Draping unstretched canvases from the ceilings, and arranging industrial fabric on the floor, he blurred the line between painting and sculpture, and helped shape the development of installation art in the 1960s and ’70s.
Gilliam broke ground also by becoming the first African American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972. By the time of his passing, aged 88, in June 2022, he had enjoyed any number of public commissions and major museum shows across the US.
Although Gilliam is not as well-known on this side of the Atlantic, he visited Ireland in the early 1990s, and was greatly moved by the experience. His stay is commemorated in Sewing Fields, the new exhibition of his work curated by Mary Cremin and Seán Kissane at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin.
“When we first started talking about this exhibition,” says Cremin, “I met Gilliam’s widow, Annie Gawlak. She came to IMMA and told us about how Gilliam had completed a three-week artist’s residency at the Ballinglen Art Foundation in County Mayo in 1993.
“Gilliam normally worked on large canvases with petroleum paints, but he wasn’t allowed to bring those paints on the plane, so he dyed and painted fabric and sent it on ahead to Ballinaglen. And when he got there, he worked with a local seamstress to collage pieces of the fabric together, so they’re kind of stacked on top of each other. You’ll see one of those pieces in the exhibition, it’s part of a series of four called Cottages. I think the experience was quite transformative for him.”
Gilliam was one of the many international artists who have spent time in Ballinaglen with the support of the arts foundation established in the early 1990s by Margo Dolan and the late Peter Maxwell, who owned a prestigious art gallery in Philadelphia. The foundation runs workshops, residencies and fellowships, along with education and outreach programmes and a museum of art.
“It’s this amazing place in the middle of the village,” says Cork-born curator Cremin. “People like Howardena Pindell, who we’ve shown at IMMA, and Jo Baer, who was very influenced by the archaeology in the area, have all done residencies there. It’s very interesting that Ireland has had a real impact on these artists, and a real resonance with them in terms of art making.”
When Cremin began work on the Sewing Fields exhibition, she discovered that Gilliam had once shown in Dublin. “In the early 1970s, he had a solo exhibition with a gallerist named Oliver Dowling, who passed away just last year. Dowling was a maverick, and quite an influential person within the arts in Ireland. He helped set up the ROSC exhibitions. But it was news both to Annie and to us that Gilliam had ever exhibited in Ireland. We don’t think he came over for the opening, but everyone involved is dead now, so it’s not possible to say for sure.”
Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. “Growing up where he did,” says Cremin, “where there’s a massive cotton industry, he was probably seeing a lot of quilting and that type of making. We have an exhibition of quilts from Gee’s Bend in Mississippi on at IMMA at the moment, and we know that Gilliam had several Gee’s Bend quilts in his own art collection. There’s a correlation between this idea of stitching and layering, telling narratives through the fabrics, that I think is referenced in his work as well.”
In Gilliam’s youth, his family migrated north. He studied art at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and then settled in Washington DC. “He was part of the colour field movement, with people like Kenneth Noland. They made minimal abstract paintings. But later on, he made works that were much more three-dimensional, or sculptural, and he started really playing around with the paint, scraping, stitching and layering. There was really a lot of improvisation.
“He was very interested in jazz as well. Improvisation is very important in jazz, of course, but it’s also very important to the kind of way he worked. There were no limitations in terms of how he worked with paint or with the canvas. He was very liberated.”
Gilliam came of age during the Civil Rights Movement in America. “That was, very obviously, hugely important to everyone,” says Cremin. “And for Gilliam, being a black artist coming up at that time was a big deal, because it was predominantly white males in the art world. He wasn’t making work that was overtly political, he was making art for art’s sake. But that said, he was very involved in the establishment of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and he was part of a very important exhibition called X in America.
“And also, I guess he does engage politically, in that a lot of his paintings are called after significant black figures, like Martin Luther King. There’s one piece in the exhibition here called Count On Us, which is this beautiful three-coloured canvas that’s referencing when Obama was voted in as president. It was a very aspirational and very exciting time. So, he referenced politics in a different way.”
Sewing Fields was organised in collaboration with the Sam Gilliam Foundation, which is run by the late artist’s family. “Gilliam was very supportive of young black artists, and his foundation has continued that work,” says Cremin. “They also collaborate on exhibitions such as this, ensuring that Gilliam’s work is shown as he would have liked. Some of the work in Sewing Fields has never been shown before, and some of the technicians who’d been with Gilliam since the 1980s came over to help with the installation.
“It’s only two years since Gilliam passed, but I guess it’s important for his work to continue to grow, and for people to have an increased awareness around him. In terms of contemporary Ireland, this is not just the first time he’s been shown here since the 1970s, it’s his first museum show here as well. Many of these works have never been exhibited before, and many people are travelling over from America to see the show. It’s really exciting for us.”
Gilliam’s time in Mayo may have been brief, but the landscape had a big influence on his work, says Cremin. “Even towards the end of his life, he was making these really large paintings, with thick impasto, he called Downpatrick Head and Irish, County Mayo. As Annie says, he always referenced back to his time in Ireland.”
- Sam Gilliam, Sewing Fields runs at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until January 25, 2026. Further information: imma.ie
