Camille Giraud Akeju, Sam Gilliam, BK Adams, and Stephen Cummings at the opening for Adams's exhibition, "Exercise Your Mynd" at the Anacostia Community Museum in August 2011. Photo by Susana Raab. Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
As a child, Sam Gilliam's mother encouraged his drawing. The seventh child of Estery and Sam Gilliam especially liked to draw horses, one of many things that he would have in common with future friend Lou Stovall, whom he met in the early 1960s when both arrived in Washington, DC.
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, Gilliam moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1942 and graduated from Central High School in 1951. Among his mentors at the University of Louisville, which first admitted African Americans in 1950, was Ulfert Wilkie, an abstract expressionist painter from Germany with an interest in African sculpture. Another influence was portrait painter Eugene Leake, who directed The Art Center in Louisville at the time (later becoming president of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore). Fulfilling his ROTC service, Gilliam sandwiched a stint in the US Army between earning undergraduate (BA, 1955) and graduate degrees (MFA, 1961) in fine arts.
Beyond his immense contributions to the visual arts, Sam Gilliam was a beloved mentor who cultivated the talent and spirit of District artists with an immense generosity of heart.
-Heran Sereke-Brhan, Executive Director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities1
Artists Lou Stovall and Di Bagley Stovall arrived in Washington, DC around the same time that Gilliam did, becoming lifelong friends and collaborators. At the Stovall's Workshop, Inc., they created silkscreen prints. Gilliam wrote the introduction for the catalogue accompanying Through Their Eyes: The Art of Lou and Di Stovall, an exhibition held at the Anacostia Community Museum in 1983.
Stovall and Gilliam both counted Howard University's art faculty among their mentors, especially James A. Porter and James V. Herring. (Stovall came to the city to continue his undergraduate studies at Howard University.) These professors modeled maintaining their artistic practice while also teaching in the community as well as at the university. Howard's first fine arts graduate, Alma Thomas, was also an artistic and pedagogical elder.
Sam changed the course of my life, like he inspired the lives of many others, as a generous teacher, mischievous friend, and sage mentor. Above all, Sam embodied a vital spirit of freedom achieved with fearlessness, ferocity, sensitivity, and poetry.
-David Kordansky, whose gallery represented Sam Gilliam, in a statement on his passing in 20222
Gilliam taught and exhibited at the Corcoran, where he found inspiration from Thomas Downing. The Corcoran brought Di Bagley Stovall to DC and birthed the first iteration of the multifacted studio, Corcoran Workshop, that evolved into Workshop, Inc. Another influence, Corcoran curator Walter Hopps, selected Gilliam's artwork to represent the United States in the 1972 Venice Biennale, a first for an African American artist.
Gilliam offered mentorship through his involvement with the Anacostia Community Museum. For example, he served as a juror for an annual exhibition of the District of Columbia Art Association (DCAA), an organization founded by art educators including Alma Thomas and Howard University professor Loïs Mailou Jones, who, with Kenneth Young, joined Gilliam as jurors for DCAA's 1971 exhibition.
...Sam has always been very encouraging, supportive and appreciative of my work as a photographer. It was not a “peer-to-peer relationship” – I looked up to Sam and valued his direction as my MFA advisor, and still do.
-Photographer Carol Harrison3
Gilliam mentored two generations in the case of photographer Carol Harrison, who studied with Gilliam at the University of Maryland while earning her MFA. She published a book about her daughter Olivia visiting Gilliam at his nearby studio that chronicles their relationship from Olivia's babyhood to young adulthood.
Notes
1. Silverman, Melissa. "Career-Spanning Exhibit Showcases Sam Gilliam in the Round," The Southwester, 19 July 2022.
2. Kordansky, David. In Memoriam: Sam Gilliam. 27 June 2022.
3. Bettman, Robert. Sam Gilliam and Olivia: An Interview with Carol Harrison, Jefferson Place Gallery, 1957-1974.
Resources
African American Artists: Affirmation Today, National Museum of American Art, 1994. Featuring Leroy Almon, Frederick Brown, Sam Gilliam (45-second clip), Loïs Mailou Jones, and Keith Morrison.
Samet, Jennifer. "Beer with a Painter: Sam Gilliam," Hyperallergic, 19 March 2016.
