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Norfolk Keels
- African-American Artist
- Abstract
- Colors
- Non-objective
- Multi
- Washington Color Painters
- Norfolk, VA
- Washington, D.C.
American, 1933-2022
Norfolk Keels, 1998
Acrylic on cotton duck and marine hardware
Museum Purchase and Gift of Oriana and Arnold McKinnon, Calvert and Harry Lester,
Bridget and Al Ritter, Leah and Richard Waitzer, Helen Gifford, and Daisy Dickson 98.27
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Norfolk Keels is not a traditional museum object like a painting or sculpture. It is a
site-specific installation, a work of art designed by an artist in response to a unique
space. When installed it becomes a part of that space, changing it and at the same
time helping us understand a familiar spot in new and exciting ways.
Sam Gilliam designed Norfolk Keels especially for Huber Court. Working with his
assistants, he hung and draped and adjusted these great swaths of brilliantly colored
fabric until he had brought them into a kind of dynamic equilibrium, until the lengths
of fabric hung in harmony with themselves and with the surrounding architecture.
Gilliam thought of his works as a visual parallel to jazz music. Much as a jazz musician
steps beyond the written notes on his page so Gilliam created works that are "Structured
Improvisations," a careful balance of freedom and structure, chaos and control.
Tupelo, Miss. 1933
Norfolk Keels, 1998
Acrylic on canvas, approx. 360 × 480 in. (914.4 × 1219.2 cm)
Museum Purchase and Gift of Oriana and Arnold McKinnon, Calvert and Harry Lester, Bridget and Al Ritter, Leah and Richard Waitzer, Helen Gifford, and Daisy Dickson, 98.27.1-6
Sam Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C., in 1962, after earning his masters degree in painting at the University of Louisville. There he joined a group of abstract painters, led by Morris Louis (see object 77.1240) and Kenneth Noland, who were continuing experiments in expressionism begun by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler (see objects 83.592, 89.54). Louis died in 1962, but younger artists including Gilliam, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring continued in a similar vein. They acquired the label Washington Color Painters in a 1965 exhibition.
For most of the serious artists and critics of the 1960s, modernist painting was supposed to develop progressively and logically over time; its goal was the perfect expression of the essential qualities that distinguished painting from all other media. For the Abstract Expressionists, those qualities had been "flatness" and pure abstraction. The authoritative critic Clement Greenberg recognized the Washington Color Painters as heirs to the movement that had made Pollock famous and New York the undisputed center of modern art.
Preferring the intense colors of acrylic paint over oil, Gilliam and his colleagues used techniques such as staining and bleeding thinned paint into very large canvases, pouring paint in rivulets along folded fabric, and, for Gilliam, raking paint in thick layers onto the canvas and folding and reopening the painting while it was still wet. In 1968 he made the formal leap that established him as a painter of serious stature. He discarded the wooden "stretcher" support for the canvas and freely arranged his paintings in folds, waves, and pleats, draping them over sawhorses, mounting them against walls, and suspending them from ceilings. "In retrospect," Gilliam wrote later, "I can see that these canvases reflect certain tendencies in the art of the time. Many artists were searching for ways to shape a work so that its overall configuration was a result of the process." Within a few years, Gilliam began to create large environments, site-specific works like Autumn Surf (1973) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since then, he has continued to use his staining and draping technique for public commissions.
By the 1970s Gilliam was among the most important black artists in the country, and one of a very few who worked exclusively in abstraction. He assumed this role with some ambivalence. His accomplishments were part of a formalist tradition that largely denied the world outside the studio; his cultural identity in that context was simply "modernist." Over time, however, Gilliam came to address black aesthetics and the cultural meaning of blackness in both his art and his public statements. Art historian David Driskell, a specialist in African-American culture, has characterized Gilliam's creativity as an equivalent of jazz, blues, gospel, and other "structured innovations" of black origin.
Gilliam designed Norfolk Keels for the Chrysler Museum of Art's classical entrance hall, Huber Court. First, he prepared six large stained and painted canvases in his studio. Then, with the aid of assistants, he installed the paintings in the upper spaces of the glass-roofed atrium. The paintings are attached to steel beams with marine hardware; several corners were left hanging freely to form triangular swaths. The colorful billows and wedges suggest the forms of boats in a harbor, in reference to Norfolk's nautical history. From the floor of Huber Court, the vividly expressive paintings are framed against a formal grid of steel and glass overhead. The effects of color, light, and shadow vary with the season and the weather.
MNH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 264-265, no. 161.