Rio by Sam Gilliam

Among the artists Sam Gilliam considered his guides—Expressionist pioneer Emil Nolde, and Washington Color School contemporaries Morris Louis and Tom Downing—perhaps the most surprising is saxophone legend John Coltrane.

Listen to Coltrane’s Ascension from 1965, the year Gilliam unfurled his “drape” paintings—lyrically stained and soaked raw canvases, freed from the confines of frames and stretchers. It’s a similar billowing of Coltrane’s approach, unspooling the structure of jazz—little wonder Gilliam was entranced by what he called Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.”

Knowing the music that inspired him invites us to explore the relationship between sight, space, and sound. Do you see the apricot, carnation, and salmon hues emerging in slow bloom, while layers of horns lean forward and back, in translucent ebb and flow? Do your eyes hop to the spatters of slate violet galaxies, alongside the jostle of piano and snare?

The dynamics of jazz echo dichotomies in Gilliam’s work. Just as jazz is built on a  foundation of particular instruments, combos, rhythms, and scales, painting’s structure was oil or acrylic on canvas—but Gilliam sensed that between these lay a limitless field. Like many post-Abstract Expressionists, he affirmed the physical reality of his paintings, but he stayed utterly expressive.

Bundling and folding his medium, he reconfigured our expectations of what painting was or could be. Here, too, he absorbed jazz’s willingness to blur its properties. Like his bop inspiration, Gilliam’s riffs on harmonic color and saturation made painting atmospheric, evoking inner and outer space.

There’s performance in how Gilliam’s work is shown, particularly his larger-scale installations spanning walls, ceilings, and floors. In such settings, he reacted to space in real time, feeling its flow, deciding how hues and textures should drift organically through it. These paintings are different with every viewing, just as no jazz performance is repeated, for he found that “jazz leads to the acrobatics of art.”

— Gary Liu, Tour Programs Manager

Sam Gilliam (1933–2022. Lived and worked in Washington, D.C.)
Rio, 1970
Acrylic on canvas
Gift of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, 2011, and gift of James Jensen
(TCM.2007.34.5)