Sam Gilliam: Carousel Form II

Sam Gilliam: Carousel Form II

Ongoing

Gallery 4

Join us in welcoming back one of the Speed’s iconic collection artworks and experience one of Sam Gilliam’s transformative, genre-defying, immersive “drape paintings” up close.

Suspended from the ceiling and gathered at six points, Carousel Form II (1969) transforms painting into a monumental sculptural and architectural presence. Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) stained the unstretched canvas with layers of acrylic pigment, then splashed, folded, rolled, and manipulated its surface. These actions produced passages of luminous color that shift between improvisation and control.

Gilliam developed his celebrated drape paintings during the late 1960s, radically liberating the canvas from the conventional wooden stretcher. Although he drew upon the staining techniques associated with the Washington Color School, Gilliam rejected its emphasis on flatness and geometric order. Instead, he allowed gravity, gesture, and the surrounding architecture to continually reshape the experience of his paintings. Each installation creates what the artist described as a “painterly environment,” changing in response to the proportions, light, and movement of its setting.

Born in Mississippi and raised in Louisville, Sam Gilliam studied painting at the University of Louisville before establishing his career in Washington, DC. Together with the artist’s monumental painting Restore (1968), installed nearby in Gallery 3, these works represent a defining moment in Gilliam’s transformation of postwar abstraction.

Gilliam graduated from Louisville’s Central High School in 1951 and then attended the University of Louisville, where he was a member of the second admitted class of Black undergraduate students. He joined the ROTC and served in the US Army from 1956 to 1958, stationed in Japan. He subsequently returned to the University of Louisville to complete his graduate studies in art.

Gilliam became active in Louisville’s artist community and cofounded Gallery Enterprises (1957–1961), a Black artist collective whose members included Bob Thompson (1937–1966), Kenneth Victor Young (1933–2017), Fred F. Bond (c. 1931–1986), G. Caliman Coxe (1907–1999), Robert L. Douglas (1934–2023), and Eugenia V. Dunn (1918–1971), several of whom would remain active in the local art scene.

In 1962, Gilliam moved to Washington, DC, where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. Gilliam returned home to Louisville often to visit his family and remained associated with the Louisville Art Workshop (1966–1978), another collective that expanded upon the work of Gallery Enterprises. In 1969, his exhibition at Jefferson Place Gallery in Washington featured his first large-scale drape paintings, including Carousel Form II. During his lifetime, the artist would go on to serve as a trustee emeritus at the Speed Art Museum. The Museum also hosted major solo exhibitions of his work three times (2006, 1996, 1976), including his touring museum retrospective in the 2000s.

Carousel Form II is on view as part of Present Tension: Contemporary Art from the Speed Art Museum Collection. The Speed Art Museum is honored to present four major works on view by Sam Gilliam as part of this special collection presentation.

This work is also installed to broaden conversations around Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Eric N. Mack’s RARE ESSENCE, which is currently on view in the Speed’s Gheens Court.