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Sam Gilliam, 1967-1973

NEUBAU / 09.06.-30.09.2018 / Curators: Dr. Jonathan Binstock, Josef Helfenstein

Sam Gilliam (b. Tupelo, Mississippi, 1933) is one of America's most prominent abstract painters. Works by the artist, who has lived and worked in Washington, D.C., since 1962, are held by numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the MoMA (New York), the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art. The Music of Color is his first solo exhibition in Europe. The show puts the focus on the years between 1967 and 1973, the period of the greatest radicalism in Gilliam's oeuvre. His Yves Klein Blue, which harks back to his experimental early work, was presented at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
In 1967, Gilliam began work on a series of what came to be known as beveled-edge paintings: he poured acrylic paint directly onto the unprimed canvas, which he folded and crumpled while the paint was still wet. He then stretched the canvas over a chamfered frame, lending the painting a spatial and object-like quality. Gilliam's signature creative achievement is the drape paintings series, begun in 1968, for which he applied the same procedure as in the beveled-edge paintings but then released the canvas from the stretcher frame. Unlike easel paintings, which usually function independently of their context, the drape paintings evince a performative aspect and interact with their respective settings; they can be installed in a variety of ways depending on the spatial context.

Gilliam strove to blur the widely accepted boundary between painting and sculpture even as prominent contemporaries such as Donald Judd sought to reaffirm it. The paintings he created between 1967 and 1973 stand out for their monumentality and forceful use of color. The canvas becomes a medium that records traces of the production process and exhibits its own physicality. At a time when painting seemed to be in decline, Gilliam breathed new life into it; jazz was an important source of inspiration for his expressive and energetic style.

The Music of Color also probes the political and historical dimension of Gilliam's oeuvre. While the artist himself rarely comments on political issues, the works in his Martin Luther King series and Jail Jungle reflect the 1968 race riots and the highly polarized debate over black art and abstract painting in 1960s and 1970s America.

The Kunstmuseum Basel presents 45 outstanding works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States.

The exhibition is supported by:

Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG

Terra Foundation for American Art

Pierrette Schlettwein

L. + Th. La Roche-Stiftung

Stiftung für das Kunstmuseum Basel

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NEUBAU / 09.06.-30.09.2018 / Curators: Dr. Jonathan Binstock, Josef Helfenstein Sam Gilliam (b. Tupelo, Mississippi, 1933) is one of America's most prominent abstract painters. Works by the artist, who has lived and worked in Washington, D.C., since 1962, are held by numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the MoMA (New York), the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art.

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The presentation marks the first time the artists' works will be shown together expressly as a reflection of their decades-long friendship.

The exhibition will consist of two sections, with the first comprising large-scale works by each artist: a site-specific barbed-wire installation by Edwards that responds to the architecture of the gallery, a monumental drape painting by Gilliam, and a suite of Williams's early paintings from his seminal Diamond in a Box series. As a counterpoint to these larger-scale works, the second section of the exhibition will consist of drawings and works on paper.

Bringing the artists' individual bodies of work into conversation with one another, the show addresses questions of monumentality and gravity, materiality and objecthood, the self and the collective, and the personal and the political. At the heart of the exhibition is an examination of abstraction as a force that might signify life without directly representing it.

As Williams stated during a 2010 panel discussion at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "When my work, or Sam's work, or Mel's work is on the wall ... it's an invitation to see the work and share in a kind of human experience that we are producing ... The specifics may be a narrative about African American culture, but the African American culture is part of a larger human experience. All the human possibilities are available to all of us ..."

Pace's exhibition takes its title from Thelonius Monk and Kenny Clarke's 1941 jazz standard, which riffs on the Greek word epistrophe, a formal structure in poetry that involves a repeated phrase or turn at the end of a line or stanza. Celebrating the "epistrophies" and affinities linking the oeuvres of these three artists, the presentation's title also underscores the degree to which-across time, space, and media-Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams have made work bound not only by the context of their friendship, but by a sense of being shaped in the crucible of Black culture: in particular, the culture of jazz.

The exhibition's title also alludes to the work of literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards, who has used the concept of epistrophe as a metaphor for the cross-pollination between music and poetry that cuts through the history of Black cultural production. All three of the artists in the exhibition have spoken about the presence and power of jazz in their lives and work. "Music was that presence that established a reservoir of thought in me," Gilliam recently reflected, "that allowed me to build, to enjoy, to be free." Williams was drawn both the "complexity" of jazz music and its ability to function as "a reassertion of cultural identity." "The model for me," Edwards has said, "was the music. Jazz musicians were expressing without being literal."

Among the first artists to exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem-where they showed together in 1969-Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams have long been closely associated by their historical status in the history of postwar American art. The significance of their contributions to art history remains particularly evident in their decades-long engagement with the relationship between history and identity, on the one hand, and formal and perceptual questions of visual structure, material presence, and the act of mark-making on the other.

Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams first became acquainted with one another in New York during the late 1960s, quickly striking up an artistic and intellectual exchange that continues to the present day. Despite differences in their trajectories then and now, the three artists have returned again and again to many of the same basic questions, as well as to each other as interlocutors, enacting a historical epistrophe that marks their common sense of art's expansive possibilities.

Works by Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams investigate the powers and poetics of abstraction, traversing shared territories of scale and space, gravity and suspension, body and spirit, mortality, and transcendence. The artists have always insisted on art itself, rather than the creator, as the primary site of meaning, even as they have explored art's indelible links both to individual identity and collective experience. Probing the limits of formal open-endedness, each artist indexes specificities of Black life while articulating his own language of universal significance.

Each body of work in Pace's exhibition suggests a historical refrain. Edwards's barbed-wire installations have been an ongoing enterprise for the artist since 1970, when he debuted them at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (That presentation marked the museum's first solo sculpture exhibition of work by a Black artist.) He has also developed several open-ended series in tandem, including both works on paper and the welded steel sculptures of the Lynch Fragments, for which he remains best known. In 2022, Melvin Edwards will be the subject of a solo exhibition of barbed wire sculptures from the late 1960s at Dia Beacon.

Gilliam's radical drape paintings-which famously liberated the canvas from the stretcher, upending the doxa of flatness at the heart of Modernism-were begun in the late 1960s and developed further in the early 1970s. In recent years, Gilliam has powerfully extended his engagement with the drape, exploring a new range of chromatic and spatial possibilities. He has meanwhile pursued a practice of creating works on paper throughout his career, utilizing custom-made Japanese washi as both support and substance.

Williams is widely revered for his rigorous and far-ranging engagement with the history of painting. He came to prominence as a hard-edged color-field abstractionist in the late 1960s in New York with his Diamond in a Box series, which refers specifically to the aesthetics of jazz. These early works suggest, in Williams's own words, a sense of "dissonance," a condition that resonated during a period of American history marked by struggles for civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Williams's visual language has evolved steadily since then, incorporating waves of successive innovations and refining a rigorously experimental approach to the materiality and ontology of painting that foregrounds the persistence and primacy of memory.

The exhibition is organized by Pace Gallery and curated by Oliver Shultz, Curatorial Director at Pace. Special thanks to Alexander Gray Associates and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

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Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, and William T. Williams: Epistrophy | Pace Gallery

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The presentation marks the first time the artists' works will be shown together expressly as a reflection of their decades-long friendship. The exhibition will consist of two sections, with the first comprising large-scale works by each artist: a site-specific barbed-wire installation by Edwards that responds to the architecture of the gallery, a monumental drape painting by Gilliam, and a suite of Williams's early paintings from his seminal Diamond in a Box series.

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How does a Brooklyn artist imagine both her past and future? After a decade of hard-fought accomplishments in New York City, artist Marela Zacarías completes a large-scale project while anticipating the arrival of her first child. Leaving behind a career painting public murals, Zacarías moved to the city hungry for artistic growth, and completed an MFA at Hunter College, shifting her practice towards a more satisfying form of personal expression.

"Grad school put me upside down," she says, "It really pushed me to find out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And I'm glad, because now I feel like I can say a lot more things through my own language." The fruits of Zacarías's labor are evident in her Bedford-Stuyvesant studio: the artist, along with her husband, Weston Pew, and a team of assistants, are hard at work creating the undulating sculptural and painterly forms that have become the artist's signature.

The new work-a commission for the William Vale Hotel -reveals the historical evolution of neighborhoods like Williamsburg, where the hotel is currently under construction. Zacarías herself is part of the city's irresistible collective ambition, having become a full-time artist with a growing studio practice while bringing a baby boy into the world. Like the city she calls home, Zacarías envisions a bright future. "It seems like it's not going to get slower," says the artist, "I'm definitely not planning on stopping my work and hopefully get to spend all my time with my baby and seem him grow."

Featuring the work Mannahatta (2016).

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Credits

Art21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Director & Co-Producer: RAVA Films. Cinematography & Editing: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Aerial Photography: John Marton. Design & Graphics: Open & Uros Perisic. Artwork: Marela Zacarías. Music: Ergo Phizmiz & Margita Zalite, Jackson F. Smith, Podington Bear & Yacht. Thanks: Colleen RJC Bratton, David Foarde, Katherine Garcia, Emily Mason, Christian Maychack, Coralina Meyer, Drew Miller, Weston Pew, Michael Roopenian, Ray Smith, Mordy Steinfeld, Sean William Sweeney, José Luis Tranche, The Brooklyn Arts Council & The William Vale Hotel. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2016. All rights reserved.

Art21 New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and by individual contributors.

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Marela Zacarías was born in 1978 in Mexico City, Mexico, and currently lives and works between New York and Mexico City. A muralist painter for more than ten years, Zacarías wanted to bring walls into three-dimensional space. Her resulting wall-mounted painted sculptures twist and turn in unruly ways, built from window screens, joint compound, and polymer before being painted in bold, geometric, abstract patterns. Explaining her shift away from figurative painting, Zacarías says, "I feel like abstraction really allows for the story to be filtered and to come out in a different way in which people can see it or not see it at all."

"Grad school put me upside down. It really pushed me to find out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And I'm glad, because now I feel like I can say a lot more things through my own language."

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Marela Zacarías's Great Expectations - Art21

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Slides, Artist handouts, Instructional posters, Vocab posters, Artist research

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This idea for the lesson is based upon the works of the recently late artist Sam Gilliam. The activity will have students come together and use color to create a large scale piece of free canvas art. This lesson focuses on creative freedom and abstract forms of creating and displaying art. This activity is a way to inspire the idea of creating large works and promote collaboration between other artists.

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https://yngspc.com/artists/2016/10/eddie-love/

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EL: I'm from Fayetteville, Arkansas. A progressive community of about 90,000 with a strong vision towards the future of what our state, or at least our region, Northwest Arkansas, can represent for the arts & culture of middle America.
What first led you to become interested in painting?
As far back as I can remember, I always considered myself an artist, before I even realized that was a thing a person could be. My papers in school were always filled with drawings, characters & doodles, without much concern for the day-to-day curriculum of public school. Since visual arts always came so naturally, I eventually developed interest in writing during middle school, trying my hand at a terrible novel, then evolving into screenplays.

Upon high school, that abstract desire had matured into another passion; architecture. With full intentions of college, studies consisted of a 3 year after-school program, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. Though reaching the end of senior year, with auto-cad becoming the norm, I refused to let go of my pencil on paper ideals (plus math), and I realized architecture wasn't my path.

The boring summer after high school was my real genesis of the person I am today. A buddy turned me on to graffiti - using small handmade stencils on utility boxes - spray paint became my go-to medium, which is still prevalent in my current work. Without any thought, other than I have always had a heavy hand & the childlike inclination, I deemed myself "MESS-1". That small hobby evolved into what I do today.
What made you decide to pursue art more seriously?
I think the answer to that question would be a series of setbacks, decisions, & happenstance. Back in 2001, the same year I began painting, NYC rock band The Strokes released their debut album "IS THIS IT" in September, & upon discovering it, & becoming absolutely obsessed - something inside me said "Oh! Holy shit! I can do that too!" Those 33 minutes of listening and watching live videos of that band really changed my life & made me not only realize you can, but you should, do anything in life you want if you have talent, do it for the right reasons, work extremely hard and don't listen to other people's criticism disguised as advice. So over the next 2 years I lost 125 pounds, put together my first band and wrote my first album. I decided that being an artist/musician was the most important part of my identity and it is what I would do for the rest of my life.

By 2006 I had written two more batches of songs with two different songwriting friends, but couldn't find my niche. Late 2006 I found a band called A Good Fight looking for a frontman. We crafted our sound & performance for a year & a half before we played in front of anyone, & it was worth it. We made quite a splash in the local and regional music scenes, winning numerous awards & contests that got us on some MTV shows & meetings in LA. We put out 2 pro studio albums by 2010 & were slowly recording our third full length album "The Kids Keep Asking For More" when sadly some inner band politics and whatnot derailed AGF in 2013, never finishing or releasing those songs.

I didn't want to get into another band relationship right away, so I just focused all my energy & time on painting. 4 years later and it's my defining characteristic.
It's interesting that you are self-taught and are clearly experimenting with a few different styles. What are some of your major influences?
I get a lot of criticism/comparison for this, since some of my work has a direct correlation to his work, but my favourite artist by far is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Thing is is I was painting like that before I ever heard of him or knew what he did. Once I discovered him, it only gave me more confidence to pursue this dream/life.

Other than a few other artists: Warhol, Robert Rauschenburg, I'm influenced by all sorts of random things. Music & bands plays a big role in my creation method, & nowadays, the explore button on Instagram is my favourite place to find inspiration.
What are some the challenges you've encountered in pursuit of art as a career path?
Well like I said a second ago, the Basquiat comparison can be frustrating at times, and most of the time it's a very immediate reaction from the viewer (which makes it easier to understand), but upon further inspection I hope they would see I have defined myself much more than that lazy comparison.

Other than that, getting galleries & curators to even respond to an email is insanely depressing & makes me second guess everything all the time. But that's a fleeting feeling and I know they will come around eventually haha.
What has been the most rewarding part of it?
Just being confident in myself & the choices I made to where I am now. Even though I'm broke, I drive a 12 year old car with no air conditioning, I don't own a house, etc. I also don't have a "real job" that I hate, spending most of my life making someone else rich. I chose the path most don't, and it is the best feeling in the world.

And also finishing a painting you don't really know where it's going & maybe aren't even sure if it's that good, but then all of a sudden you step back and it's done and holy crap it's excellent.
What would you consider your most exciting moment or biggest accomplishment so far?
Well I have very slowly built my brand & have clients all over the country now, so that to me is a great accomplishment.
How do you define "success" as an artist?
Pretty much a combo of my last few answers. I'm an optimistic & generally positive person - the fact that I wake up whenever I want and start painting, & don't work for someone else that doesn't give a shit about me (cuz I did that for several years too & it's the worst) I would consider that a form of success. Now if I can start selling pieces for $100 grand, that would also be a nice success!! Haha
What is your studio like? How do you get started on a piece? Do you plan ahead or work spontaneously?
Since we just moved to Nashville, my studio right now is a small bedroom in our house, probably 12'x12′, very cluttered, very unorganized, but it works for now. Over the 15 years I have had several large studios, 2 car garages or bigger, and that is definitely a better work environment for me personally. But it's big enuf I can work on 2 large pieces on the wall and one on an easel. So I'm still getting stuff done on the regular.

I hardly ever plan pieces ahead in the traditional sense, I have probably made 4 maybe 5 pieces over 15 years that I actually had a drawing or something like that for. Most of the time I just start with a base coat, usually white, and then just get lost in it. The only thing I have some sense of when I start is the basic color palette. Sometimes I have a few beers, sometimes I smoke a little, just whatever I'm feeling at the moment.
What do you feel that you need most as an artist?
Bigger canvas!
If you could sit down for a beer with anyone (living or not) and talk about anything, who would it be and what would you want to chat about?
Man, just one?! That's a tough one, are we talking like we would sit down in present day and discuss the craziness of now?! Jeez, so many: JFK, Einstein, Warhol, John Lennon, Abraham Lincoln... I don't know if I can choose just one!
Anything else you'd like to add?
Find more at saatchiart.com/louisedwardlovev!

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Inspired by midcentury and 70s/80s pop artists like Rauschenberg, Basquiat, and Warhol, self-taught artist Eddie Love experiments with a variety of media on canvas, emphasizing that mess can be beautiful, and the bigger the canvas, the bigger the statement. I love the quilt-like, abstracted compositions