The first African American at the 1972 Venice Biennale
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Hi , In 1972, Sam Gilliam became the first African American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Four years earlier, he had introduced the Drape paintings — unstretched, suspended canvases that pulled color into three dimensions and redefined the boundary between painting and sculpture in postwar American abstraction. He died in 2022 at the age of 88, and in the years directly before and since, his market has compounded compellingly: total auction turnover crossed $7.4 million in 2025, compared to ~$3M in 2017 levels. Into Changing belongs to the groundbreaking Drape lineage that belongs specifically to Gilliam's auction market — the canvases folded, scrunched, and stretched off the wall that made his name in the late 1960s and have anchored many major museum acquisitions of his work since. Each work is unique, but according to Masterworks' analysis, works by Gilliam have appreciated 91% of the time when resold at auction across our tracked dataset from '03 to '25. 
In 2022, the Hirshhorn Museum opened "Sam Gilliam: Full Circle," the largest retrospective of his work in nearly two decades. It was installed in the final weeks of his life and is widely credited with catalyzing the institutional reappraisal that the auction market has since followed. His estate is represented by Pace Gallery and David Kordansky Gallery, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Paris's Musee d'Art Moderne. NBA veteran Elliot Perry — one of the most active private collectors of postwar Black American abstraction — also holds Gilliam in his personal collection. Into Changing is available now with a total offering size of $834,000. Schedule your advisory call to review this opportunity and discover if art is a fit for your portfolio.
Thanks,
The Masterworks Team
M A S T E R W O R K S
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