Elephanta, 1970

An important African American artist at a time when artists of color were underrepresented in galleries and museums, Gilliam emerged as an innovative figure of the Washington Color School, a group of artists working in Washington, DC, in the 1950s, who were known for their technique of pouring thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas to emphasize abstraction, flatness, and the expressive power of color. Here Gilliam took this method a step further by folding and manipulating the canvas to create a complex composition among layers of wet paint. In his most iconic works, Gilliam dispenses with the stretcher, the traditional support for canvases, instead exhibiting them draped and hung loosely. For Elephanta, however, he took the opposite approach, treating the stretcher as a sculptural relief complete with beveled edges, as if projecting the work’s carefully choreographed layers and patterns of color onto a cinematic screen.