Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933 and studied art at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Gilliam moved to Washington D.C. in 1962 where he became involved with the Washington Color School, a group of artists known for the vibrant colour fields paintings.

Emerging in the mid-1960s, his canonical ‘Drape’ paintings merged painting, sculpture, and performance in conversation with architecture in entirely new ways. Suspending unstretched lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. Throughout his career he experimented with various materials and techniques.

The artist was on a residency in Ireland at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the 1990s. This experience reshaped his artistic practice. Gilliam embraced new materials, working with pre-stained fabrics that he had shipped to Ireland, cutting and layering them into sculptural compositions. A collaboration with a local dressmaker further expanded this process, reinforcing his innovative fusion of painting and textile techniques.

He taught in Washington public schools, at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Gilliam received the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts in 2007.

Gilliam’s work has been exhibited widely; he represented the United States in 1972 at the Venice Biennale and returned to Venice in 2017. His works are included in the permanent collection of  major American and international museums such as The National Gallery of Art, Washington;  Art Institute of Chicago; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Tate Modern, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

In 2023 following Gilliam's death, his widow Annie Gawlak established the Sam Gilliam Foundation to manage the artist's collection and archive and to develop scholarship and exhibitions of Gilliam's work.