Sam Gilliam

Biography

Painter Sam Gilliam was born in 1933 in Tupelo, KS. He received his BA in 1955 and his MFA in 1961, both from University of Louisville. Gilliam has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1967); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1982); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX (2007); Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2018); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2022). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1968); American Abstraction Now, Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA (1982); The Chemistry of Color: African American Artists is Philadelphia, 1970–1990, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2000); A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, Tate Modern, London, UK (2012); and Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2020). Gilliam died in 2022 in Washington, DC.

Bio updated as of 2023.