Throughout his career as an artist, Sam Gilliam has been recognized as a tireless and prodigious innovator. His work has been associated with the Washington Color School and Abstract Expressionism, but in both cases – and in all other cases of his artistic affiliations – he has vigorously expanded the range and visceral vocabulary of the prevailing aesthetic. From his early work forward, Gilliam has assiduously extended the surface planes of his art, evolving by 1980 to the creation of paintings that were decidedly three dimensional and sculptural. Currently, he creates multimedia installations and employs brightly stained polypropylene, dozens of layers of painted and printed color, computer generated imaging, metallic and iridescent acrylics, hand-made paper, aluminum, steel, and plastic. Gilliam's art is relentless in its evolution, and endlessly new.

Since 1965, Gilliam has mounted more than 20 solo exhibitions of his work at museums around the world, from the Speed and University of Kentucky museums at home in Kentucky to institutions in Seoul, Korea and Helsinki, Finland. Other museums with Sam Gilliam works in their permanent collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Musee d’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris, France.

Among numerous awards, Gilliam has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Norman W. Harris Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago, and honorary doctorates from Northwestern University and the University of Louisville.