Artist Sam Gilliam’s career is as extensive as it is acclaimed. Born in Tupelo, MS in 1933, Gilliam began painting in elementary school and went on to receive his BFA and MFA from the University of Louisville. After serving from 1956–1958 in the U.S. Army, he taught art classes in Louisville public schools while continuing to develop his own personal work in contemporary Color Field painting. Working during the emergence of abstract expressionism and largely influenced by Nathan Oliveira, Paul Klee, and German expressionist group Die Brücke, Gilliam shook the art world in 1965 when he was the first to introduce the unstretched draped canvas. Inspired by hanging clothes on clotheslines, he suspended his canvases from ceilings, walls, and floors, sometimes accompanied by pieces of metal, rocks, wood, and sculptural elements. This new form of exhibiting work earned him the title, “father of the draped canvas.”
During the 1980s, Gilliam again flexed his experimental and improvisatory nature when he changed his paint process from staining and saturating his canvas to instead applying thick layers of acrylic paint, cutting up, and rearranging pieces of canvas. Reminiscent of African American quilts, Gilliam’s work adorns metro stations and airports in addition to being preserved in a number of the most highly esteemed international art museums. The relief monoprints in his Marathon series illustrate the movement, layering of colors, and other abstract elements that are so distinctly Gilliam's.