Sam Gilliam emerged in the 1960s in association with the Washington DC Color School painters. The group, formed in the late 1950s, set itself apart from gestural abstraction. Gilliam and his peers, like Barnett Newman, prioritized color; Column Series contains three distinct shades of green arranged in a rigid, blocked-out manner, a “very, very hard-edged thing—working very logically with masking tape and striping,” according to the artist.
Gilliam increasingly improvised in the works he made throughout the 1960s. He poured, mopped, and scrubbed paint onto canvas, eventually doing away with traditional stretchers and supports. Inspired by the laundry he saw drying on lines outside his studio, Gilliam folded, knotted, and hung his pieces from ceilings and walls. By 1968, he had introduced “draped” canvases, creating an entirely new means of making and displaying a painting.