Tequila

“I see the most critical issue in painting today as one of continual renewal without repetition or imitation.”

In the late 1960s, Sam Gilliam began staining canvases then draping them from walls and ceilings. Other artists of that period painted unsized and unstretched canvases. But Gilliam was the only one who used canvas to create environments of color, integrating actual space, so that the artwork became part sculpture, part painting, part architecture. Because of this, his work is an important contribution to the history of American Formalism. Tequila is not one of these draped canvases but rather a collage of reassembled parts of paintings that extends around the stretcher’s edge, creating dimension and literal depth. The beveled sides are a testament to Gilliam’s attention to detail and craft. About Tequila critic Hal Foster stated, “One follows, with interest, the various scale of foci and the convergences and displacements that they create.”

A Black artist, Gilliam has been criticized by some for not addressing race and identity. “Art is art,” he stated in 2015, staying true to his formalist origins. In 2007 Gilliam was the subject of a 40-year retrospective that originated at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.