Sam Gilliam stands among the most innovative voices of postwar American abstraction, celebrated for expanding the very definition of painting. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and educated at the University of Louisville, Gilliam relocated to Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s, where he became affiliated with the Washington Color School. Immersed in a milieu shaped by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing, Gilliam absorbed and reimagined their formal and color concerns through his own experimental and improvisational approach.

By the mid-1960s, Gilliam had begun to challenge the conventional limits of the canvas. His early experiments in staining and splattering paint evolved into the development of his distinctive beveled-edge paintings, in which the surface was stretched over a specially fabricated frame that lifted the canvas away from the wall. These works—at once sculptural and planar—suggest a weightless optical space, paintings that appear to hover in suspension.

A Glistening (1967) exemplifies this pivotal moment in Gilliam’s career. Created during a period of intense innovation, the work’s metallic pigments, glittering surface, and cool, luminous palette evoke the expansiveness of the cosmos—an apt reflection of the Space Age imagination that captivated the public during this era. The composition’s vertical striations bear evidence of Gilliam’s folded-staining technique, which generated spontaneous pools and breaks of color as pigment settled into the creases of the canvas. Once stretched over the beveled-edge support, these marks acquire new spatial and optical dimensions, producing a sense of movement and light that shifts as the viewer changes position before the painting.

Gilliam’s career was enmeshed in the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests, yet his commitment to abstraction and its role in politics remained resolute. “The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political,” he asserted in a 2018 interview, insisting that formal invention could itself be a mode of liberation. His vision reshaped modern painting, bridging the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism with the processes of Color Field painting and the material audacity of installation.