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Sampler broke barriers in the 1950s by becoming one of the leading African American graphic designers in Los Angeles. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1955, he joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s design and typography program, which hired artists to develop the museum’s visual identity in line with contemporary trends. Encouraged by his mentor, celebrated graphic designer Saul Bass, Sampler began working for the architecture firm Victor Gruen and Associates as a draftsman on major projects, such as a stained-glass dome for a Los Angeles retail center, which he designed in a kaleidoscopic array of patterns and hues.

While working on the Gruen team, Sampler developed a signature aesthetic of tightly packed, brightly colored, and rigorously ordered geometric elements. He translated this into his practice as a painter, rendering hard-edged forms in the vivid visual language of mid-century advertising. This significant work from the mid-1960s features black and red triangles arranged in a variable grid. Subtle shifts in shape and direction create an undulating pattern that grant the surface a sense of movement, in line with the pulsing illusions of Op Art gaining traction in that era. Sampler’s pattern of repeated triangles also recalls the Birds in Flight motif common to Black quiltmakers of the American South. Though abstraction was prevalent in the 1960s, Sampler and other Black abstract artists were marginalized for their contributions to the dominant painterly form.