Samella Lewis is an artist and art historian known for her figurative works on paper as well as for her influence on the Black art historical landscape. Born on February 27, 1924, in New Orleans, Lewis began her undergraduate studies at Dillard University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in New Orleans, where she met her mentors Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. She transferred to Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), an HBCU in Hampton, Virginia, after two years, graduating in 1945 and teaching at the school from 1946 to 1947. Among her many firsts, Lewis became the first African American to earn a doctorate in art history and fine art, which she received from Ohio State University in Columbus in 1951.[1] While working on her dissertation, she spent a quarter at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, studying with the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, and began teaching as an associate professor at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, where she would stay until 1953. She also volunteered to teach Black men how to draw and paint at the city’s segregated Maryland Penitentiary, but “the administration thought that was unbecoming”[2] and prohibited her from continuing. Lewis then left Baltimore to establish in 1953 and chair until 1958 the largest art department at any southern HBCU, at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. In 1953 she also coordinated the first conference for African American artists at Florida A&M University.
In 1958 Lewis relocated to New York to teach art history at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where she would remain for the next ten years. While there, she became interested in Chinese and Asian art, eventually traveling to Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar to study Chinese language and art at Tunghai University. She was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and an associate professor of art history at California State University, Long Beach (1966–67). In 1969 she became the education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She later recalled, “At the time, LACMA’s curatorial staff had no interest in African American artists—they had a very narrow, very racist outlook.”[3] This experience led her to establish the Concerned Citizens for Black Art to encourage the museum to hire African American artists and exhibit their work. In 1970 Lewis left LACMA and was appointed professor of art history and humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she became the first tenured African American faculty member. That same year she co-founded the first African American art book publishing firm, Contemporary Crafts Gallery, in Los Angeles with the artist and actor Bernie Casey, about which she explained, “When we moved [the Contemporary Crafts Gallery to Pico Boulevard], the name was changed to Gallery Tanner, after the great Henry Ossawa Tanner. We began putting on exhibitions by Elizabeth Catlett for example.”[4] She also consulted on an exhibition about the history of Black artists with Evangeline Montgomery at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California.
Lewis founded the Museum of African American Art in 1976, the first museum of African American art in the western region of the United States, at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall in Los Angeles, and served as its senior curator until 1986. In 1976 she co-founded the first nationally circulated Black visual arts periodical, Black Art: An International Quarterly, which later became the International Review of African American Art. She traveled to Nigeria in 1977 to organize the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture,a trip that exposed her to a global Black community and thereby affected her teaching. When asked what she was working on in 2002, she replied, “On getting in that studio and making some very, very political paintings that I will probably be arrested for. I am angry. I want to leave this country, but I don’t have any place to go. I really want to go away…Forever. I would miss Black America. But I want to go someplace Black. But I don’t know where to go.”[5]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
Notes
[1] Lewis also earned her MA from Ohio State University in 1948.
[2] Lewis, quoted in Hewitt 2002, 157.
[3] Lewis 2017, 228.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Lewis, quoted in Hewitt 2002, 173.
References
Brodsky, Judith K., and Ferris Olin. 2018. “Samella Sanders Lewis: Making Visible the Cultural Legacy of the African Diaspora.” In Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Durón, Maximilíano. 2021. “Samella Lewis, Artist and Historian Focused on Advancing Black Art, Awarded CAA’s Highest Honor.” ARTnews, February 12, 2021. Accessed March 22, 2022. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/college-art-association-samella-lewis-lifetime-achievement-artist-award-1234583763/.
Farrington, Lisa E. 2005. “Civil Rights and Black Power.” In Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. New York: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Juliette. 2001. “Samella Lewis: An Art Institution in Her Own Right.” International Review of African American Art 18, no. 1 (2001): 14–15.
Hewitt, Mary Jane. 2002. Interview of Samella Lewis by Mary Jane Hewitt. New York: Hatch Billops Collection.
Keith, Naima J. n.d. “Samella Lewis.” Hammer Museum. Accessed March 22, 2022. https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/samella-lewis.
Lewis, Samella. 1999. Image and Belief. Interview by Richard Cándida Smith. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust.
Lewis, Samella. 2017. “Samella Lewis.” In Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, edited by Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley. London: Tate Publishing.
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