© Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), London
Interpretation
In the 1980s, Gilliam stated, "Figurative art doesn’t represent blackness any more than a non-narrative media-oriented kind
of painting, like what I do." Consistently committed to abstraction since the 1960s, the artist radicalized painting by dispensing with stretchers and frames, draping, hanging, knotting, and folding his stained and saturated canvases into colorful three-dimensional rhythms. This print relates to Gilliam’s Black Paintings series of the late 1970s, in which he enhanced the rugged asphalt-like surface by dragging a shag-rug rake across gel-thickened acrylic paint, producing encrusted and poetically evocative expanses of shifting patterns.
Information
- Title
- Coffee Thyme II
- Object Number
- 2006-221
- Medium
- Lithograph, screenprint, etching and embossing
- Dates
- 1980
- Dimensions
- 79 × 103 cm (31 1/8 × 40 9/16 in.) frame: 102.3 × 127.1 × 3.8 cm (40 1/4 × 50 1/16 × 1 1/2 in.)
- Credit Line
- Gift of James Kraft, Class of 1957
- Culture
- American
- Place made
- North America, United States
- Inscriptions
- Titled in graphite, lower center: Coffee Thyme II Signed and dated in graphite, lower right: Sam Gilliam '80
- Hold: A Meditation on Black Aesthetics (Princeton University Art Museum, November 4, 2017–February 11, 2018)
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