Draped painting
[4] Sam Gilliam in Washington, D.C.,[5] Claude Viallat in France,[4] and Nina Yankowitz in New York[6] - among possibly others - concurrently and without knowledge of each other began knotting and folding their wet canvases or painted fabrics to achieve the patterns they wanted in the compositions before draping them in different combinations on the wall, starting in 1967 and 1968.
[4][8] Sculptors and mixed media artists including Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Robert Morris, all working around the same time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were also beginning to use suspended and wall-based fabrics and sculptural elements, draped or shaped in similar ways.
"[21] Further still, he told filmmaker Rohini Tallala in 2004 that the Drape paintings had been inspired by his father's work as a hobbyist carpenter making sets for plays at their church in Louisville.
The following year, an exhibition at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art, Gilliam/Krebs/McGowin (with Rockne Krebs and Ed McGowin), presented ten of Gilliam's largest and most immersive Drape works up to that point.
Inspired by the large bronze rings that decorate the top of the museum's building, which Gilliam said had made him imagine Neptune using them to tie seahorses to his temple, the work consisted of six monumental painted canvases, two measuring 40 x 95 ft and four measuring 30 x 60 ft, hung from their respective top corners on the outside walls of the museum, attached via the rings and drooping down in upside-down arches of folds.
[24] Gilliam integrated the natural environment into a Drape work completed in 1977 for an artist residency at the Artpark State Park in upstate New York,[25] where he was assisted in part by his daughter Melissa.
[32] Combining his earlier immersive Drape installations with his printmaking and sewing techniques, he used woodcut engravings to stamp an over 3000 ft length of polypropylene before staining, painting, and then cutting it into long, thin pieces.
The director of the museum later recalled that, after she had given Gilliam somewhat negative feedback on a work he was preparing inside a gallery, he decided to throw the canvases in the pool as a different artistic direction, building custom floatation devices to keep them situated through the exhibition.
[38] Titled Flour Mill and directly inspired by the American abstract artist Arthur Dove's painting Flour Mill II from 1938, which is owned by the museum, Gilliam's installation comprised a series of narrow, 8–10 ft long nylon panels,[38] each folded in half over a set of wires in multiple rows spanning the width of the well next to the stairs, and hanging down from the second floor to the first.
[42] In 2017 he installed Yves Klein Blue outside the main building for the show Vive Arte Viva at the 57th Vennice Biennale, similar to the presentation of the earlier Seahorses.
