sculptural works, and exhibited extensively in D.C. and across the Southeast. In 2019, journalist Greg Allen wrote about Gilliam's insulation from mainstream art spaces in Art in America, saying "if, at some periods in his extensive career, Gilliam seemed invisible, it’s simply because people refused to see him." Gilliam himself said in 1989 that "I’ve learned the difference between what is really good and real for me and what is something that I dreamed would be real and good for me. I’ve learned to — I don’t mean to say I’ve learned to love this — but I’ve learned to accept this, the matter of staying here." Beginning in the 2000s, Gilliam's career saw a marked resurgence in critical and institutional attention, starting with his first full-scale retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in 2005. In 2012, Los Angeles-based gallerist David Kordansky visited Gilliam in Washington with the artist Rashid Johnson to offer representation and begin planning an exhibition, a request that reportedly moved Gilliam to tears. Kordansky subsequently helped place major works by the artist in high-profile institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art and organized several exhibitions of Gilliam's work. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s Gilliam participated in a large number of high-profile solo and group shows, including exhibiting at the Venice Biennale for a second time in 2017, in the Giardini's central pavilion for the show Viva Arte Viva. His work Yves Klein Blue (2017), a large-scale draped painting, was hung outside the entrance of the venue. His first European retrospective, Sam Gilliam: Music of Color, was hosted in 2018 by the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 2019 Gilliam acquired representation through a New York-based gallery for the first time, Pace Gallery. In 2022, one month before his death, he debuted a series of tondo paintings in a solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The abstract paintings, the first of Gilliam's works in the tondo form, are circular canvases in beveled frames containing fields of color, sometimes overflowing onto the frames themselves. The paintings' beveled frames represented a return to a form the artist had originally explored in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognition Gilliam had many commissions, grants, awards, and honorary doctorates. His honors included eight honorary doctorates, and the Kentucky Governor's Award in the Arts. He received several National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Longview Foundation Award,