Sam Gilliam: STITCHED

In 1993, Sam Gilliam was accepted as the artist in residence at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in the rural north of Ireland and went to ship his usual paints to the residency. When the paints were barred from shipment because they contained highly flammable petroleum, Gilliam found himself in a dire circumstance that called for innovation. At his studio in Washington D.C., Gilliam painted and stained a large group of monumental loose canvases, folded them up, and shipped them to Ballinglen. These canvases became the source material for a new body of work he would produce in Ireland—for a painting residency during which he did no actual painting. Once on site, Gilliam hired a local seamstress and worked alongside her every day, cutting and stitching the pre-painted canvases to construct brand new paintings from the found material of his own creation. The results were dynamic three-dimensional wall works and hanging sculptures, vibrant compositions of colliding and coalescing geometries and colors which defy easy categorization as painting or sculpture. Gilliam's stitched works are perhaps best understood as Constructivist objects, which reflect his tireless spirit of invention, much like the circumstances of their own creation. Three decades later, many of these works were shown for the first time in Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin in 2025. On view at Pace at its 510 West 25th Street from March 12 to April 25, Sam Gilliam: STITCHED expands upon the IMMA exhibition. The gallery's presentation features many of the wall-mounted works that were the focus of IMMA's exhibition, as well as never-before-seen volumetric, balloon-like hanging sculptures from the same period. The exhibition marks the United States debut for all included works, and the global debut for several others.