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.