Sam Gilliam (Tupelo, Mississippi, 1933 – Washington, D.C., 2022) is renowned for his Drape paintings (stained, unstretched canvases suspended from walls or ceilings) which dissolved the boundary between painting and sculpture and remain among the most radical formal inventions in postwar American art.

Born the seventh of eight children to a carpenter and a schoolteacher, Gilliam moved with his family to Louisville, Kentucky, where he earned both a BFA and an MFA from the University of Louisville. He worked in a figurative style before relocating to Washington, D.C. in 1962, where exposure to Abstract Expressionism drew him toward pure abstraction and into the orbit of the Washington Color School. Over the following years he began dismantling the conventions of the stretched canvas: first folding a painted, still-wet edge over itself in his Beveled-edge paintings, then removing the canvas from its stretcher altogether in the Drapes. "The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination," he later said of that turn. A 1969 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art brought the Drapes to wide attention, and in 1972 Gilliam became the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a monumental 75-foot drape in the American Pavilion.

Gilliam was frequently pressed, as a Black artist working through the civil rights era, to make work that addressed politics and race more directly; he resisted that expectation, insisting that abstraction carried its own charge. "My work is as political as it is formal," he said. Because each Drape was rehung fresh for every installation, folded, gathered, or let fall differently depending on the room's architecture, no two showings of the same canvas were ever quite the same painting, gravity itself acting as a compositional tool alongside the artist's hand.

He left the Drapes behind in the late 1970s rather than repeat himself. His Black Paintings (1977–79) built up thick, collaged surfaces in near-total black, cut into geometric fragments and reassembled in patterns that echoed African American quilting traditions, a technique he carried through the 1980s into further "quilted" paintings and, later, into freestanding painted-metal sculpture for public commissions. Gilliam's work returned to the Venice Biennale in 2017, forty-five years after his historic first appearance there; the renewed attention this brought was less the discovery of a forgotten artist than an institutional correction, recognition finally catching up to work that had continued evolving throughout the 1980s and 1990s largely outside the art world's notice. His paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art.