In his relatively short and restricted life, Sam Gant achieved international recognition as a strong, original American artist. His richly colored expressionist paintings command prices ranging into several thousand dollars and have attracted many buyers of contemporary and “outsider” art in the United States and Europe.

His work has been shown in New York since 1995, and in 1997, it was hung in four concurrent exhibits: a large solo show at the American Primitive Gallery and group shows at the Outsider Art Fair, the National Black Fine Art Show, and the Pelham Art Center. His art has also been exhibited in France, Denmark, and Japan and in many US cities: Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gant’s art career spanned only 16 years, beginning in 1984 when he enrolled at NIAD. He spent most, if not all, of his life struggling to communicate despite diagnoses of autism and deafness and a resulting inability to verbalize. Gant came to NIAD at age 29 with no art experience, but he developed strong spatial and structural perceptions and excellent eye-hand coordination for drawing.

In painting, Gant found a means to elicit responses from others. Gradually, under the careful guidance of NIAD staff, he began to structure paintings with color planes and areas, and to decorate them with verbal images: strings of letters and numbers, his name, and eventually words, phrases and telephone numbers. He often used them with one or more other images including animals, women, flowers, moons, stars, racing cars, guns, rockets, and round-bodied airplanes and spaceships with graceful curved wings. He developed a wide chromatic range of colors that he applied freely but carefully. Instead of chaos, the combination of these elements attains a resolution, a union of disparate imagery in a world of color.

In June 2000 at age 45, Gant died of congestive heart failure in Richmond where he resided for many years in a board-in-care home.

A memorial written by his fellow NIAD artists states,

He was motivated to communicate with his teachers first by drawing pictures, then by writing simple words, and ultimately speaking. He found ways to communicate with his colleagues. Gant laughed more, enjoyed dancing, excursions, and discussions.

Gant’s art suggest a richer interior life, a connection felt between the body, the soul, and the universe transcending the constraints of the artist’s mostly silent world.