One of America’s most important and influential abstract visual artists has died: Sam Gilliam, a great colorist whose work influenced generations of artists, was 88. His death was announced by the Pace Gallery, which has represented him since 2019.

Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1933 as the seventh child of eight, born to a father who worked on the railroad and a stay-at-home mother. He attended the University of Louisville for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but in 1962 moved to Washington, DC, where he lived and had his studio for the rest of his life. He became one of the leading artists of the Washington Color School – a 1950s movement that emphasized large fields of color.

He was very interested in freeing his paintings from the limitations of canvases and frames. Instead, in his Drape works of the 1960s, he took unstretched canvases and hung them from ceilings or pinned them in large cascades to the walls. Each time his work – part painting, part sculpture – was installed in an exhibition, it was hung differently, never twice the same way.

In a 2018 morning edition profile, Gilliam explained that the intention behind his Drape work was “to develop the idea of ​​movement into shapes” – and that he was inspired by laundry hanging on a clothesline.

In the late 1970s, he painted thick canvases, then cut and rearranged geometric shapes. The results evoked both the African American quilts and the improvisations of the jazz music he loved.

In 2016, Gilliam launched a 28-foot public work commissioned by the newly created Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

His work is represented in the collections of some of the most famous museums in the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Modern in London; and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

Currently, the exhibition Sam Gilliam: full circle is on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, through 9/11, and his work Dual fusion is on view at Dia Beacon in Beacon, NY

Gilliam has also been the recipient of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum, as well as the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. In 2015, he was awarded the US State Department Medal of Arts. Life Achievement Award.

In the 2018 morning edition profile, Gilliam, then 84, said he was feeling his best, despite struggling with his health. “I’ve never felt better in my life. I quit drinking, I quit smoking. I live for this time of being in the studio and actually working.”

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