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Sam Gilliam is associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C., artists who developed a new approach to abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s. They stained unprimed canvases with pigment, following the 1953 breakthrough and innovative technique by Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. Although he was greatly inspired by Frank Stella who began shaping his canvases in 1960, Gilliam was the first artist to remove the painted canvas from the stretcher and to display it suspended from the ceiling or by arranging it on the wall or floor. This stretched painting, Cordial I, dates from 1972, the year that Gilliam represented the U.S. at the prestigious international
art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, as the first African-American artist to do so. It was donated to the Museum in 1973 by Fort Lauderdale collectors Dr. and Mrs. Henry R. Hope. Dr. Hope was an art historian, collector, and trustee of the Museum. He was an authority on 20th-century art and a longtime editor of the Art Journal.