Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective at Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Sam Gilliam: a retrospective 

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC

October 15, 2005 - January 22, 2006

Sam Gilliam: a retrospective marks the first full-career retrospective of Sam Gilliam and the most extensive presentation of his work to date. Sam Gilliam first achieved widespread acclaim in the late 1960s with his groundbreaking Draped paintings, which blur distinctions between painting, sculpture and architecture. Now into his fifth decade as an artist, Sam Gilliam, who has been described as the most prominent African American abstract painter, continues to create innovative approaches that influence younger generations of artists. A retrospective reveals the hallmarks of Sam Gilliam’s constantly evolving aesthetic: exploration, risk and formal invention. The exhibition features monumental paintings, elaborate mixed-media constructions and installations. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and accompagnied by a catalogue.

“Sam Gilliam’s concentrated focus on painting and his belief that, as a discipline made up of objects, it is essentially no different from sculpture radically distinguishes him from his contemporaries who were also interested in furthering the modernist tradition, including color-field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and the artists associated with the Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland,” notes Jonathan P. Binstock, exhibition organizer and Corcoran Curator of Contemporary Art. “Gilliam’s ambition was, and still is, not just to reinvigorate the modernist tradition, but also to create new possibilities by thinking outside the dominant critical modes through which modernism is generally understood.”

Featuring approximately 45 works dating from 1967 to the present, a retrospective highlights Gilliam’s early beveled-edge and Draped paintings, his White and Black paintings of the 1970s, metal and wood constructions of the 1980s and 1990s and monochromatic Slatts of recent years. His early Slice paintings are distinguished by the rhythmic patterns of their painted creases, which he made by folding acrylic-soaked canvases like accordions and allowing them to dry before unfurling them to see what he had made. Deep beveled-edge stretchers create the impression that these paintings, with Gilliam’s sybaritic color combinations, are emerging from the wall as objects of weight, substance and sculptural presence.

To create his renowned Draped, or suspended, paintings, Sam Gilliam discarded the stretcher completely, allowing his soaked and stained canvases to sag and hang from gallery ceilings and to interact with sculptural elements, such as handmade sawhorses or site-specific architectural details. Sometimes monumental in scale, these lyrical works swing through space, on occasion enabling viewers to walk under and through them, giving individuals the opportunity to be literally enveloped by painterly color.

In the past, critics have tended either to explain Sam Gilliam’s achievements as a Washington Color School artist or to situate his work within the confines of an African American art tradition. To concentrate too much on either account is to miss the brilliance and scope of his remarkable career, and his significant contributions to abstraction.

“While he is African American, he is not necessarily a maker of black art,” adds Jonathan P. Binstock, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Gilliam and has worked with the artist for many years. “In the late 1960s, Gilliam himself argued adamantly against applying the term ‘black art’ to his work. Indeed, because of its abstract qualities, his work was often criticized at the time for not adhering to the so-called socially responsible aesthetic then popularized by the Black Power movement. Nonetheless, certain works do engage an African American significance, such as Composed (formerly Dark As I Am) (1968 - 74). An extraordinary painting and one of the most important self-portraits of the era, Composed (formerly Dark As I Am) was created as an expressive response to certain kinds of political wrangling that Gilliam believes are out of place in discussions of art.”

A Washington, D.C. resident, Sam Gilliam has been included in numerous museum and gallery shows and his career was effectively launched in a group show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969. His first solo museum showcases were in 1968 at The Phillips Collection and in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was one of six artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among other notable institutions, collect his work. Sam Gilliam’s art is also represented in public collections abroad, including the Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Tate Gallery, London.

SAM GILLIAM: A RETROSPETIVE

Exhibition Catalogue

University of California Press, 2005

The exhibition is accompanied by the first fully illustrated in-depth scholarly publication, published by the University of California Press, devoted to Sam Gilliam. The 237-page catalogue documents the works in the exhibition, as well as other Gilliam projects, including examples of his public commissions, site-specific temporary installations and a stage set design. Complete with more than 75 full-color images and 30 black-and-white illustrations, the catalogue features an essay by Jonathan P. Binstock, the exhibition’s organizer and Corcoran Curator of Contemporary Art. Dr. Binstock explores the artist’s career and discusses his influences, antecedents and contributions to the history of art in the context of late-twentieth century political and social developments. Renowned curator and early Gilliam champion Walter Hopps, who died in March 2005 and who held curatorial positions at the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among other institutions, wrote one of the catalogue’s two Forewords. The other is by Jacquelyn D. Serwer, the Corcoran’s Chief Curator. The catalogue also includes an illustrated chronology, bibliography and other relevant support material. 

Curator: Jonathan P. Binstock

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART

500 Seventeenth St., NW, Washington, DC 20006

www.corcoran.org

Updated 26.07.2021

Sally Mann: What Remains - Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

Sally Mann: What Remains 

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington 

June 12 - September 6, 2004 

Drawing upon her personal experiences as inspiration, Sally Mann creates a haunting series of photographs that speaks about the one subject that affects us all, the loss of life. Dark, beautiful and revelatory, What Remains, a five-part meditation on mortality, explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, spirit and earth. Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Sally Mann asks us to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life has ended. The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Bulfinch Press.

“Death is powerful,” says Sally Mann. “It’s perhaps best approached as a springboard to appreciate life more fully. That’s why this show ends with pictures of living people, pictures of my children. This whole body of work is a process of thanksgiving.”

Organized in five sections, Sally Mann: What Remains features more than 90 photographs. Matter Lent depicts the decomposition of Mann’s beloved pet greyhound, Eva. Here, she uses the wet-collodion process, a practice in nineteenth-century photography, to create images that are simultaneously painterly, illusionistic, weathered and photographic. Untitled, perhaps the most visually shocking section in the exhibition, is made up of images of human bodies going through the natural process of decomposition at a forensic study site. In this series, Mann does not shield the viewer from the reality of bodily decay.

 “There’s a moment where you look at those bodies and say, ‘that was a human being.’ That was someone who was loved, cherished, caressed,” says Sally Mann. “That’s a very tough one for me, the whole question of when a human becomes remains. That question came up over and over again while I was doing this work.”

The middle section of this exhibition features two series of landscape images: December 8, 2000 focuses on the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on Sally Mann’s bucolic property in Virginia’s rural Shenandoah Valley. She witnessed life meeting death at her doorstep and this transitional incident served as the raw inspiration from which her photographic project unfolded. The Antietam series of landscape photographs, made at the Antietam battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland, go far beyond simple documentation of this rural Civil War location where 23,000 men were killed, wounded or declared missing on a single day in September 1862. These large scale images invite the viewer to contemplate the role of photography in documenting history, time passing and death’s sanctification of the eternal soil. Sally Mann concludes the project with What Remains, thirty-six extreme close-up portraits of her three children’s faces seen floating in an inky black atmosphere. While the subjects of these loving photographs appear in stark contrast to the ghostly images of death in her other series, the viewer cannot help but recall the other images when looking into the faces of the children. In this context, her children are “what remains.”

“This project is an epic visual poem – a philosophical rumination on mortality, one subject that no one can really explain. What happens to life when it ends? What remains that we do not see? Who could better explore this essentially unknowable topic than an artist with Sally Mann’s questioning gaze,” comments Philip Brookman, Corcoran Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts and curator of the exhibition. “For Sally, such an examination of the moment when the present becomes past should be accomplished by using photographic processes of another era as well.”

WET-COLLODION PROCESS

Introduced in 1851, the wet-collodion process is a method of making photographic negatives using a glass plate coated with chemicals. The plate is sensitized in a silver nitrate solution and exposed to light while still wet and sticky, which gives the photographer about 5 minutes to make the exposure. 

ABOUT SALLY MANN

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951. She received a BA from Hollins College in 1974 and an MA in writing from the same school in 1975. Mann has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sally Mann’s photographs have been featured in several Corcoran exhibitions: In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places (2001), Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry (1996) and Sally Mann: The Lewis Law Portfolio (1977), Sally Mann’s first one-person exhibition. Her past publications include Second Sight, At Twelve, Immediate Family and Still Time. A documentary film about Sally Mann’s family pictures was nominated for an Academy Award in 1993. A feature-length follow-up spanning her career is in development and will air on HBO and the BBC. Time magazine named Sally Mann as America’s best photographer in 2001. She lives in Virginia with her family and seven rescued greyhounds.

CATALOGUE

Bulfinch Press has published a 132 page book with 85 tritone photographs and one four-color photograph that accompanies the exhibition Sally Mann: What Remains - www.bulfinchpress.com.

Sally Mann: What Remains is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Following the presentation at the Corcoran, Sally Mann: What Remains will begin a national tour.

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART

New York Avenue and 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC

www.corcoran.org

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC - At the Edge: A Portuguese Futurist - Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

At the Edge: A Portuguese Futurist -

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso 

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington 

September 11 - November 28, 1999 

The Corcoran Gallery of Art with the Portuguese Ministry of Culture in Lisbon and the Embassy of Portugal in Washington presents an exhibition of the major modernist paintings and drawings by Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887-1918). The presentation spans Souza Cardoso’s entire career and features 34 paintings, 19 works on paper, and archival materials. At the Edge is the first exhibition ever mounted in the United States devoted exclusively to the work of this influential artist.

A pioneer of modernism and a national cultural hero in Portugual, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso enjoyed a promising but tragically brief career. He settled in Paris as a student in 1906, immersing himself in the bohemian culture of the city while becoming friends with Amedeo Modigliani, Juan Gris, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Diego Rivera and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. In the company of these artists, Souza Cardoso developed a personal style that combined exuberant and fanciful color with the newly invented forms of cubism and futurism. He also played with abstracted and fragmented forms in his paintings, often using more than one point of view in a single picture. 

"With breathtaking facility, Souza Cardoso worked through the major avant-garde trends of his day and came up with an original modernist style characterized by wonderful color, inventive subject matter and innovative form," says Dr. Jack Cowart, Corcoran Deputy Director and Chief Curator. "He was steadily gaining momentum with his adventurous work and had already made major contributions to modern art when he died in the great influenza epidemic shortly before his thirty-first birthday. This exhibition not only showcases his life’s work, but provokes us to imagine what might have been."

Throughout his career, Souza Cardoso maintained a strong connection to his native Portugal, but he also incorporated into his art modernist approaches developing in Europe, especially in Paris, where he lived. He worked in a variety of ways, often drawing the on the multiple viewpoints of cubism and the dynamism of futurism. He painted the dramatic mountainous landscapes of his native region Marão, in Montanhas; the elaborate Catholic processions he witnessed near his home in Portugal in Procissão Corpus Christi; extraordinary abstract portraits of his friends in Paris; and complex, vibrant still lifes that combine elements of Portuguese folk art with symbols of the Paris metropolis. Using rhythmic, circular forms of floating color, Souza Cardoso also painted some of the earliest completely nonrepresentational pictures ever created.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was born on November 14, 1887 in Manhufe, Portugal. In 1905, he traveled to Lisbon to study architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts. On his 19th birthday, Souza Cardoso left Lisbon for Paris where he quickly abandoned his architectural studies and decided to become a painter. While in Paris, Souza Cardoso participated in several important exhibitions such as the Salon des Indépendants of 1911 and 1912 as well as the Salon d’Automne of 1912. He also exhibited works at the Herbstsalon in Berlin and the Salon in London. In 1913, American art impresario Walter Pach invited Souza Cardoso to present eight works at the most important exhibition of avant-garde art in America, the historic International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. The exhibition opened in New York City and then traveled to Chicago and Boston. Souza Cardoso sold seven of his eight works to several notable American collectors.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was living in Paris but visiting his family in Portugual when the First World War broke out. Stranded by the war, he continued to paint and created some of his most complex and original works, such as Coty, a striking work that refers to the French perfume and combines the image of a female nude with bits of broken mirror, sand and hair pins.

After presentation at the Corcoran, At the Edge travels to the Arts Club in Chicago (January 20 - March 17, 2000). A fully illustrated catalogue, the only monograph in English on Souza Cardoso, accompanies the exhibition. It features essays by noted Portuguese experts, including Professor José-Augusto França of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, as well as American scholars Dr. Kenneth Silver of New York University, Ms. Rosemary O’Neill of the Parsons School of Design and Ms. Laura Coyle, assistant curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. These essays discuss Souza Cardoso’s biography, his stylistic development, the context of his years in Paris, his friendship with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, his relationship with Walter Pach, his participation in the Armory Show and the interest of American collectors in his work.

The exhibition was organized by the Office of International Relations, Ministry of Culture, Portugal and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. 

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART

500 Seventeenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

www.corcoran.org