When artist Sam Gilliam died last weekend at the age of 88, he left behind groundbreaking works of art, especially his draped canvases stained with colorful colors that forever changed the way the world imagined itself. But he also left a more personal legacy: his influence on fellow artists and friends.
The 85-year-old sculptor Melvin Edwards has been a friend of Gilliam’s for more than 50 years, forming a close trio with artist William T. Williams. Edwards and Gilliam owned each other’s work and inquired endlessly about the process, sometimes talking three or four times a day.
“We always wondered why the other did something a certain way,” said Edwards, perhaps best known for his Lynch Fragments and Barbed Wire series. “But that was the nature of Sam’s work: she always questioned space. “
Just two days after Gilliam’s death, Edwards and Johnson talked about how they handled his life and work, his decision to stay in Washington, and his success as his best critic in a conversation that was edited and shortened.
How do you look at Sam’s characteristic move now – the removal of the canvas from the wall and its draping, which he thinks is partly inspired by laundry hanging on laundry ropes?
MELVIN EDWARDS Sam was a very good artist who was curious and experimental. Thinking about the surfaces on which art is made did not begin with Sam – but he took a step that most people did not realize was possible. Sam took the step. He was seen in the right way by some people who paid attention to such things, and they immediately blessed him.
Often, fellow artists are quick to recognize the implications of style and its possible significance. One of the earliest things I did involved hanging steel elements and chains. When Sam and I showed up together at the Studio Museum in Haarlem [in a landmark 1969 show], I made the first of my pieces of barbed wire, some of which were attached to a wall, some of which were hung. And we almost took it for granted that we were both taking steps.
So there were these whirlwinds and echoes between you, right?
EDWARDS Look, it’s all visual art, not labeling. It’s either up or down, or left or right. For me and most artists, it’s like having a baby. When you have sex, you don’t think about how you will name the baby.
Rashid, what were the entry points for you with Sam’s work?
RASHID JOHNSON There are many, but the most important is his attitude to improvisation, his ability to react in real time with gestures, marking and making decisions in a way that is consistent with America’s largest art form and the most ambitious. innovation: Jazz music. We talked about it. I just watch Sam explore with an honest and radical sense of self. This radicalism was associated with improvisation and innovation.
What innovations in particular?
JOHNSON His bevels are as much an ambitious innovation to me as the manual mission of the canvas from the stretcher. [Gilliam’s “Beveled-Edge” or “Slice” paintings, a series that began in the late 1960s, were made on beveled-edge stretchers that projected off the wall.] I think there is something really important in this work.
Mel, do you agree?
EDWARDS You didn’t have to know which way to go with Sam. The songs were supported in different ways. For example, in the recent show at Pace [featuring Edwards and Williams], the saws he used were the perfect foil for Sam, distributing his work horizontally. There was a human scale, while the other works in this exhibition took us straight to the ceiling.
Sam was quite competitive, talking about his desire to win the game of art – now artists don’t really talk that way.
JOHNSON Part of that is a generation. Older artists are more likely to recognize the competitive spirit. It is different from today. I have such respect for this thinking. There is beauty in trying to win. Even if there is no direct opponent.
He was a tennis player and maybe that had to do with the desire to compete.
EDWARDS When we talked two months ago, I teased Sam that he was a tennis player. Our friend William was a track runner and jumper, and football was my main sport in high school. We were all physical people who understood physical dynamics. I do not mean to translate one-on-one to our work, but I mean sensitivity to three dimensions.
Rashid, you talked about the decision of a black artist in the 1960s and 1970s to work abstractly and not to portray blackness directly in representative or figurative terms – and how that lives for you.
JOHNSON That was a decision, and it’s a silly task to pretend it’s not true. Sam and artists like Sam, who chose abstraction as a means and saw it as a way forward, were equally aware of the fact that they did not involve the black body and thematic black issues. Thanks to these people. It wasn’t always rewarding in the typical way.
Sam remained in Washington and did not have a consistent performance at the gallery in New York, the center of the art world, for the rest of his life. How did this affect his career?
EDWARDS He had his independence, which was at the core of his personality anyway.
When I interviewed him in 2018 and asked him if being Black had sustained his career, he answered yes and no and was not interested in clearing up the contradiction.
JOHNSON Honestly, I like him and I see a lot of truth in both answers. White Western history often does a great job of centering. For me, as a young artist, Sam Gilliam was important. Mel, Ed Clark, William T. Williams, these were heroes for me. And the fact that they were not so ambitiously represented in some of the cultural institutions was not an obstacle to how I see the world.
EDWARDS People think that things written for white people are what we should strive for as significant. The art world has its own ways of looking at things and has its own ways of educating us so that we often limit our thinking. Sam, after all, was not limited to these things.
I know it’s so soon after his death, but what is his key legacy?
JOHNSON I feel happy about the life he has lived and excited about the impact he has had on so many of us. For me, these are the cycles in his life and career – the fact that he continued to work and continue to do things that not only complement his legacy, but complement it. I know some people will quote his early breakthroughs, but I think in the last three years he has given us something that may be as ambitious as he once did, to be honest. This part matters. This man really went on.
EDWARDS I’m just glad Sam was Sam and doing what he felt he wanted to do. He always maintained that attitude. You can fill the entire New York Times with Sam alone and forget the rest. This is my emotional attitude towards my friend. He was happy that his work attracted more attention and more finances came up, but it was a hell of a struggle. He always wanted to do the job and he did it until he could.
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