MENTOR PROTEGE: The Art of Inspiration
Rising
art star Rashid Johnson pays homage to the colorful, defiantly abstract
paintings of 79-year-old Sam Gilliam by curating an exhibition devoted to
Gilliam's early works.
"SOME
OF THESE GESSOED?" asks the artist Rashid Johnson, gesturing at several colorful
canvases leaning against a wall in 79-year-old Sam Gilliam's airy Washington,
D.C., studio. "No," Gilliam corrects, speaking more deliberately than
Johnson's enthusiastic clip. "They're all raw." Johnson, 35, furrows
his brow, bends over and peers at one of the paintings as though it contains
code.
Last
summer, Gilliam—known for his vibrant, often monumentally scaled
paintings—received a call from Johnson, who wanted to curate an exhibition of
the older artist's work. Gilliam first made his name in the 1960s as a member
of the Washington Color School, a group of D.C. painters that used similar
techniques: staining large unprimed canvases, embracing abstraction and
energetic color. Unlike many black artists of his generation, he shied away
from addressing race head-on, producing geometric paintings, and then, in the
late '60s and '70s, the large, draped canvases for which he is best known. In
1976, three Gilliam canvases covered almost an entire external wall of the
Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art—like a giant's tie-dyed laundry hung up to
dry. "I wanted to brighten things up," Gilliam says, "rather
than just be concerned with the problem."
In recent
decades—though still admired among contemporary art aficionados—Gilliam has
slipped into semi-obscurity. A review of his 2006 retrospective at Washington's
Corcoran Gallery in The Wall Street Journal was titled "A
Master of Color Too Long in the Shadows." Johnson
hopes to change all that.
A rising
star of the art world, Johnson has had dozens of solo shows, including one at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2012, the same year he was
nominated for the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize. Around Gilliam, however, he is
an eager and attentive pupil. Johnson first learned of Gilliam in the early
2000s while in his twenties and still an undergrad in his hometown of Chicago.
It seemed to Johnson that Gilliam had been overlooked in favor of black artists
who had engaged more directly with identity politics. This spring, Johnson will
curate a show of some of Gilliam's early work at the David Kordansky Gallery in
Los Angeles (March 28–May 11), where both artists are signed.
"Surprised
the hell out of me," says Gilliam about the initial call from Johnson, an
amused smile playing across his face.
Gilliam
on Johnson
"The
Washington Color School gave me a chance to fit into a future, rather than fit
into what was domestic. In Washington, in the '60s, you could see where you
wanted to go; you could see what you were thirsty for. you could feel the
beckoning of the future—the ability to open up, to think about universals,
spiritualism, all the things that a world contains.
Rashid is
different. He's more of a documentary-type artist. He talks about history. He
thinks about the questions that the man on the street wants to think about.
That's been the tenet of the younger generation: to handle close problems
rather than to be more objective. Rashid is more like a lot of artists today:
writes well, speaks well and thinks well. I'm a picture artist; he's
conceptual.
Young
artists today walk into the art world on their own and do what they want to do.
It's the making of the career that's hard. They can't find the shiny path that
seems to be what successful artists have. The conflict between what happens in
the studio and what happens on the outside is still there—the public wanting
things to go a certain way and the artist wanting things to go another way in
terms of a career. Figuring out what a career is, how to work, when to work and
what to work on—that's the dilemma you talk about with younger artists.
I encourage young artists to know what's in books but to go beyond
books, to see what is going on outside of school, because that's what you're
actually training for. To see the variables. The fact is, I'm still the same,
perhaps, as I was when I was younger. The idea of the work is still the same.
You see something as an extension of a certain time or a certain date, rather
than the observation that the optimism of the '50s and '60s still
continues—quieter but still the same. I see a kind of optimism when I talk with
Rashid."
Johnson
on Gilliam
"[Gallerist]
David Kordansky and I came down to Sam's studio for the first time about a year
ago. It felt like a life-changing experience for both of us to see the breadth
of the work. We saw a small early canvas and we were like, 'What are these?'
And Sam said, 'I made more of them, I was making them in the '60s.' The show
that I'm going to be curating focuses pretty heavily on some of those earlier
works. It gave me an opportunity to wrap my hands thickly around a moment.
I think
that Sam's work deals with bigger human concerns about art and life. You think
about Sam making these abstract geometric paintings in 1965. And you think
about all the things that are happening in 1965—it's very specific to avoid
representation of those things. It's kind of like escape as a protest: I'm going
to refuse to participate in this problem, and I'm going to continue to
manufacture and make things that I think are part of this bigger conversation.
One of
the things I specifically learned [from Sam and his generation] was that when
racial discourse was brought to their work, there was a lot of opportunity for
projection. What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to
define my relationship to race. My composition often goes toward the black
middle class, or the black super-wealthy, or strong historical black figures.
After starting my work thinking about those signifiers—having loaded my
narrative with that stuff—it's given me the flexibility at this stage in my
life to deal a lot more with art-making and material. I wanted my art to deal
with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal
with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the
influence of African-American artists.
There's a
tremendous amount of respect between us. In some ways I'm still very
intimidated by Sam. It's been great to be able to talk to him, to talk a little
about his influences. I don't want to bug him too much. I just want to pick up
what I can. He's been really generous letting me follow him around, asking him
questions for the exhibition. I thought maybe he'd say, 'OK, well, let the kid
have a couple of pieces,' and maybe even dictate to me what he thought was the
correct approach. But he's really given me a lot of flexibility. He's kind of
like, 'Run, young fellow, you like this stuff.'"
—Edited
from Chloe Schama's interview with Sam Gilliam and Rashid Johnson.
