This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 WASHINGTON - Throughout the 20th century, more than a few radical artists attacked the canvas. They ripped it from the frame, sliced it with a knife, burned holes into it and shot at it, sometimes with paint, sometimes with more lethal ammunition. Canvas became a metaphor for art and society, for the old ways of doing things, for the oppressive, immutable weight of complacency and cruelty woven into so much of the human-made world. Sam Gilliam didn't attack the canvas, he liberated it. That distinction was critical to his career, and the affection felt by so many for the artist, who died Saturday at age 88. Gilliam lived a long life, a productive one, and his artistic adventure was enormously varied and restlessly inventive. But it was work he began making in the mid- to late 1960s, using unstretched, draped canvas for which he is best known, and which secured both his entree and his … [Read more...] about Sam Gilliam never fought the canvas – he liberated it