Gallery Beat

Sam Gilliam portrait by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

X for X,” 2021, acrylic and mixed media on panel in beveled frame, 48 x 48 x 4 inches (121.9 x 121.9 x 10.2 cm). Photo: Jonathan Nesteruk. © 2022 Sam Gilliam /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection, San Francisco.

About Time!

Sam Gilliam Museum Show Finally Comes to the DMV

Over the decades that I have lived in the DMV (an acronym that I invented decades ago in several meandering posts in my blog DC ART NEWS, which by the way… is now the 11th highest ranked art blog on this planet – yay!), one constant fact of the region’s museum art scene (with the notable exception of the beautiful American University art museum and most recently the Phillips Collection) has been the immense apathy that art museums located in the capital region show to their area artists.

DC art museums think of themselves as “national” museums, and are not, and have not ever been, part of a “regional/local” art scene.

Once, while a guest at the old Kojo Nmandi radio show on NPR (WAMU), I noted that it was “easier for a DC area museum curator to take a cab to Dulles to catch a flight to Berlin to visit some emerging artists’ studios in Berlin (or London, Madrid, wherever) than to catch a cab to Adams Morgan to visit a DC area emerging artist studio.”

Years of communicating this frustration to “new” museum curators and directors as the wander in and out of their positions at the Hirshhorn, the old Corcoran, various Smithsonian museums, most area University museums, etc. have yielded zero response -- since 1992 or so, the only museum director who ever met with me to discuss why their museum ignored local artists was Olga Viso when she ran the Hirshhorn decades ago.

And it takes an artist of the immense stature and presence of Sam Gilliam, whose career was almost extinguished by apathy just a decade or so ago... but was kept moving forward through the hard work of legendary DC area gallerist Marsha Mateyka, until Gilliam’s work was “rediscovered” by New York and other “outside” forces and subsequently placed where this great artist always deserved to be - at the top of the art world food chain.

My point: Gilliam artwork deserved to be the main focus and subject of a local DMV museum years and years ago.

Hirshhorn: Thank you for exhibiting Sam Gilliam and shame on you that it took outside forces to make this happen.

According to the Hirshhorn’s press release, the Sam Gilliam exhibition “Will Spotlight His Decades-Long Investigation in to Abstraction.” Titled “Sam Gilliam: Full Circle”, the show will also debut new paintings and runs May 25–Sept. 4, 2022.

The museum tells us that they “will present an exhibition by pioneering abstractionist artist Sam Gilliam. Between May 25 and Sept. 4, “Sam Gilliam: Full Circle” will pair a series of circular paintings (or tondos) created in 2021 with “Rail” (1977), a landmark painting in the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. Filling the museum’s second-floor inner-circle gallery, Gilliam’s first solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn will reflect the breadth of his multilayered practice and mark the first exhibition in Gilliam’s chosen hometown of Washington, D.C., since 2007. “Full Circle” is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator.”

They also note that “in the 60 years since moving to Washington, Gilliam has produced a prolific body of abstraction across media through which he has continually pursued new avenues of artistic expression. He initially rose to prominence in the late 1960s making large, color-stained manipulated, unstretched canvases. Gilliam continues to experiment with staining, soaking and pouring