paintings. They aren’t flat or two-dimensional artworks that you walk up to and look at on the wall. They may be detached from the wall, hanging and flowing from  ceilings out away from the walls. They may have additions of ladders and draping offering shapes that enter the space of the audience.”

Gilliam’s Drape Paintings reveal the influence by two schools (Abstract Expressionism and Color Field School), but their inventiveness reveals what he has called taking his work into “the theater of life.” They represent for Gilliam “an aesthetic of possibility and aesthetic freedom,” Tesfagiorgis said. “He adhered to that all of his life. He just refused to be bound by anything. I found that the two key words that he says in many interviews with scholars who respond to his work are ‘possibility’ and ‘freedom.’ Those remain constant reiterations in his voice and imagination. He rose above, and launched beyond the color skills of the Washington School. And of course, he had followed and moved beyond the path of Abstractionist Expressionists who were action painters. They were very much interested in paintings, splashing, and rolling paint. You can get a sense of their hand and emotional involvement in abstract expressionism. The Color Field School was very different. They were post-painterly abstractionist who, eliminated the brush, and absorbed individuals in field of multiple colors.”

Tesfagiorgis said, “In many ways, Gilliam’s Drape paintings reflect a very activist approach to art when he draped those canvases, taking the canvas off the frame, painting and folding, using various kinds of techniques, and suspending them above your head, away from the wall. He launched an aesthetic sensibility, as if to say, ‘Dig this’ or ‘My way.’ It’s like an act of resistance to a canonical two-dimension frame of absorption, where you just stand and become absorb in color. I think it is perhaps advanced his idea of ‘a theater of life’ so that creates a kind of theatricality in the engagement his work.”

In viewing Gilliam’s Drape paintings during the MMoCA exhibit, this author kept approaching them from different perspectives, almost being in a carousel as different viewpoints became relevant or enticing in engaging the work as a whole.

“With Sam Gilliam’s work you don’t just see the work,” Tesfagiorgis said. “You feel the work. You experience the work. You walk around the work. And when it is hanging from the ceiling, you walk under the work. And so that begins to become a kind of theater. It takes you from just looking to a process of experiencing, as if in a theatrical encounter. ‘If you look at the drape paintings, you see a lot of color and processes. Gilliam uses many different processes of staining the canvas and folding the canvas so that you get kind of a print amid the splashing within and throughout. And there are various soft sculpture shapes that drape in a special harmonious dynamic that invites the viewers to see, to feel, to move around with the lure of physicality. You almost want to touch it. That painting is pulling you into a performance.”

Experiencing Sam Gilliam’s Drape Paintings is like entering another reality, one that you feel rather than be cognizant of, a reality where the experience changes as one revolves around the piece of art, where it’s connection to reality is as much felt more than realized. It is abstraction that leads one into another reality, a place of possibility and expression. It is a world that Sam Gilliam and you create together.