"Do one thing for me," the sculptor Melvin Edwards says, "don't use a musical metaphor." A chastened journalist revokes his offending word, "riff," used to describe Edwards's back and forth with the painters Sam Gilliam and William T. Williams, friends for more than fifty years, during an interview done in anticipation of "Epistrophy," the trio's joint exhibition of recent and historic works opening this week at Pace Gallery in New York.
Edwards's linguistic exactitude is certainly not born of an aversion to music; all three artists are jazz aficionados who claim performers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, Ron Carter and Sonny Rollins as inspirations - and, in some cases, as friends. Perhaps Edwards's note of caution signals his exasperation with how lazily the metaphor is often applied, especially when it comes to Black artists.
Hear these men speak about their decades-long bond and their individual artistic practices, however, and certain rigorous and revelatory connections to jazz are bound to emerge: tradition as a foundation for innovation, improvisation within material and chosen constraints, competition in the context of collaboration, private labor that enables public virtuosity.
"We're all modernists and we all relate to the history of art as such," Gilliam says. This kinship does not always announce itself on the surface of their art. Gilliam, 88, the most senior of the group, has made groundbreaking innovations, including draped canvases that play with color, space and scale. For his part, Edwards, 84, works in a range of sculptural media, from the industrial metalwork of his signature "Lynch Fragments" series to his bold experiments in barbed wire. Williams, 79, is a master of multiple idioms, having early on cultivated a fusion of color-field painting and Abstract Expressionism attentive to the potentialities of geometric form. Uniting these artists' disparate practices, however, is a shared understanding of abstraction as a core principle of Black expressive culture with roots in Africa; an ambitious sense of scale; and what Gilliam describes as a penchant for "theatricality."
The three artists met in the late 1960s and showed together for the first time in 1969, in a landmark exhibition at the newly opened Studio Museum in Harlem. In the decades that followed, they exhibited together everywhere from Hartford, Conn., to Chicago to Baltimore and beyond, pushing each other to excel. Their bond, born of kindred aesthetics and shared habits, united them through lean and bountiful times. "At that point, the art world was much, much smaller, with fewer opportunities. And as such, a lot of artists were overlooked," Williams explains.
Gilliam, Edwards and Williams persevered - both individually and together. "They have traversed their own terrain in the history of art and made very distinct contributions," says Oliver Shultz, the curatorial director at Pace Gallery New York. Now, their journeys are bringing them together again, 53 years after their first joint show, in an exhibition that pays tribute to their many crosscurrents of creativity and kinship. The week before the opening, T gathered the artists together, via telephone and Zoom, to reflect on the past, present and future of their art. Their wide-ranging conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What accounts for the length and the depth of your friendship?
Melvin Edwards: Well, you know, I'm a take things for granted kind of person. They were just easy to be friends with, and that was it. Every time we got together, we enjoyed each other, talked to each other. You know, we argued, discussed, we had differences.
Sam Gilliam: Let's say that they're my creative partners. I really like both Mel's and Bill's work, and anytime we work together, it makes us competitive, and hence not to be outdone by the other. I always get excited whenever I get a chance to exhibit with them because I'm gonna come up with something special. It's because I know that if I don't … as Mel would say, you would have to wear red shoes to keep up with us!
M.E.: There are so many ways it can go because you're talking about a set of relationships that started in the '60s. And that's 60 years ago. That's encyclopedic, frankly. And we've all gone so many ways with it. You know, when you hand off the ball to Willie, you don't know where he's going. You look up and say, 'Well, wait a minute. He just scored.' You know? And that's just the way it is: to have confidence in each other, that our abilities and intentions are going to work out.
William T. Williams: I think part of our everlasting friendship has a great deal to do with common interests, and a feeling that there's a lot that can be done. Sam was in Washington. Mel and I were in New York. And over the years, there was constant dialogue, either by telephone or, sometimes literally, meeting halfway down. Sam would come up to Baltimore; we would go down to Baltimore, have lunch there and have a meeting about an exhibition or some ideas we had. It's a friendship that went past the art world, and an interconnection of three human beings that had a great deal to do with art, but had more to do with the three individuals as people. A sense of their aspirations, their commonality, and just having fun together.
M.E.: I was cheesing Sam the other day because I remember when he was playing tennis. He was practically a tennis socialite in Washington. I've never played. I love to run five yards and knock the hell out of somebody. That means I was a football player. I know that Willie was involved in track and was a broad jumper. So those are things we found out about each other through the years. Teasing and talking is natural. That visual art was our arena - well, we worked out our own variations. And then, when we encountered each other, we found ways that those could work [together].
Besides showing together, how does your friendship manifest itself in your work?
S.G.: The work became very conversational. I mean, that is, in the description of what we were doing and why we were doing it. I realized that what the work was actually doing was answering a question that I asked when I came out of school: Why I wasn't as successful compared, say, to particular white artists. And I found that [my answer] had to be in terms of work, not in terms of race or anything. When a friend of mine suggested, "Why don't you make a painting as long as the wall?" - I did: 300 feet, using material and constructing things in space. That's what Mel was doing. Bill, too.
W.T.W.: I was, I should say, fortunate enough to go to high school in Manhattan, three blocks from the Museum of Modern Art. So I became really very familiar with the works that were in the museum, and very familiar with the scale change from earlier paintings to later paintings to 20th-century paintings. That always stuck in my head, this idea of scale shift. And I'm not equating ambition with scale, just with the idea that here was a repository of all of these works that I got to look at from a very early age. When I met Sam and Mel, I sensed that same kind of grounding in the history of the medium, in the history of art making.
S.G.: I think that one of the things that happened is that we began to explore the many facets of working in a visual or sculptural or painterly manner. And I guess it's easiest to say that we are very theatrical. And not only theatrical but theatrical in a very successful way in which we use the space. So that, even though I was a painter and I use color, the painting was never the same as we moved from space to space. The shows were different.
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Read full interview at nytimes.com.
