- Title
- Untitled
- Date Made
- 2018
- Medium
- Acrylic on Cerex nylon
- Dimensions
- 117 1/2 × 45 × 21 in. (298.45 × 114.3 × 53.34 cm)
Flat: 119.5 × 227 cm (47 1/16 × 89 3/8 in.)
- Accession Number
- M.2024.85
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Untitled is part of the robust body of work created by Washington, D.C.−based painter Sam Gilliam in the final five years of his life. A Black artist who remained committed to abstraction during the height of the civil rights movement, Gilliam is best known for his pioneering “drape” paintings, which liberated the canvas from its traditional support. Inspired in part by the labor of laundresses he observed from his studio window in the mid-1960s, Gilliam moved away from conventional frames and stretchers, suspending his expansive Color Field paintings like fabric from a clothesline. As Gilliam remarked, “The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”
Frances Lazare
2024