'You could not turn away.' jerrysaltz writes on the late Sam Gilliam, whose draped paintings took the form to its outer limits
Photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images I met Sam Gilliam, who died this week, just a few years after he became the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972. I was an artist myself back then. We were at a residency called Ox-Bow, on Lake Michigan. I believe it was the first time I had been away from Chicago for more than a week since I’d been born. I was terrified.
The epic scale of these paintings intensified the minds of viewers. They felt fun, thrilling, revolutionary — an advanced vocabulary of familiar things acting strangely. Here were paintings that were storm-blown into swooping, cresting shapes, great oceanic structures that were metaphors for the sublime. You could not turn away.
I’d never felt the past, the present, and the future congeal quite this way. He was a Frankenstein undoing the death of art and recombining its body with what he told me were his ideas of “African art and textile.” The effect was like poetry, sedentary sails singing duets in space, abstract gardens hovering in air. These were paintings that were at once dancing spirits, opulent peacocks, ornate tableaus, and celestial gathering ghosts.
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