Our Collection

Sam Gilliam was born the seventh of eight children in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. He was interested in art even as a young child, and recalled being inspired by watching a painter in his community by the name of Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr. paint murals. He was painting seriously by elementary school and received special encouragement by his fifth grade teacher. By this time, his family had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and in 1951, Gilliam, graduated from Central High School in Louisville. In 1955, he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in fine arts from the University of Louisville, where he had his first solo exhibition. He also enrolled there as a graduate student, but his education was put on hold as he served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958. He returned to the University of Louisville following his discharge, and completed his master of arts degree in fine arts in 1961.
Upon graduation, Gilliam taught art in the Louisville public schools. In 1962 he married journalist Dorothy Butler, who was the first Black female journalist at The Washington Post. The couple moved to Washington, D.C., in part because of the work being done by the Washington Color School. In his first years showing his work, he made friends with painter Tom Downing, who attended Gilliam’s first show, which he deemed “pretty bad”, with the exception of a watercolor.
Gilliam’s career has also been marked by his role as a teacher and as a public artist. Beginning as a teacher in Louisville public schools, Gilliam went on to teach in the Washington public schools for nearly a decade, and then at the Maryland Institute, College of Art and the University of Maryland, and for several years at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. One of the few successful, self-supporting African American artists who views the teaching of art as a mission, Gilliam conducts workshops, lectures and participates in panels all over the world.

An outstanding creator of public art, Gilliam frequently works on a monumental scale and has received numerous major public commissions around the country. Some of his most notable works are grace metro stations and airports such as the Jamaica Center Train Station in New York, and the Seattle- Tacoma International Airport, which features 2004’s Yellow Fog mosaic column.

In recognition of his role as an artistic revolutionary, Gilliam has received eight honorary doctorates, including an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from his alma mater, in 1980. In 1972, he became the first African-American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and was invited back in 2017. He has also been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts awards, fellowships from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006, the University of Louisville also named him Alumnus of the Year.

Today, Gilliam’s work is in ever-increasing demand. He currently has a long-term installation on view at Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York, which opened in 2019. In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Gilliam has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), among many other institutions. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark; and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, Sam Gilliam will be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.