Lewis, Samella

LEWIS, SAMELLA (1923-2022). An artist, curator, educator, institution builder, and scholar, Samella Lewis could rightly be called the godmother of African American art scholarship, emphatically including its very leftwing elements. Her teaching, writings, curatorial efforts, film productions, and other activities reflect her tireless commitment to Black artists. Her work inspired generations of scholars who documented the contributions of Black artists to American and international art history and visual culture. Her major publication, the two-volume Black Artists on Art (1969, 1971) and Art: African American (1979) (later republished as African American Art and Artists in 2003), helped establish and institutionalize the field of African American art. Her own journal, Black Art: An International Quarterly, further solidified both the field and her scholarly reputation.

Lewis was born in segregated New Orleans and experienced the indignities of Jim Crow in early life. She began her formal art studies at Dillard University in New Orleans, a historically Black institution. There she met artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), who encouraged her to transfer to Virginia’s Hampton Institute.

That relationship and move proved life-altering. Catlett had a strongly leftist worldview, and Lewis often cited her as a primary influence. She noted that Catlett regularly brought figures like Paul Robeson into her classroom, allowing the young Lewis to incorporate a radical vision that later infused both her academic and creative efforts throughout her long life.

At Hampton, she encountered Charles W. White, whose leftist views and activities similarly affected Lewis. That radical outlook encouraged her to promote her African American identity in her art and in her life. Her work with Jewish emigree Viktor Lowenfeld at Hampton likewise reinforced her progressive vision of race, class, and gender in all her multifaceted efforts.

Following her 1945 graduation, Lewis pursued graduate training at Ohio State University. She earned a PhD in art history focusing on Chinese art, another departure from the Eurocentric tradition. After advanced work in Taiwan, she began her extensive teaching career.

During her work at Florida A & M University, from 1953 through 1958, she became active in the NAACP, then viewed as “communist” by Southern racists. That activism made her a target, including violence from the KKK and hostility from the Florida governor who saw Lewis as a “troublemaker” for her anti-segregation views and actions.

Her civil rights involvements continued after she moved to Plattsburgh, New York, teaching at the State University of New York branch. There, she founded an NAACP chapter. That political spirit persisted after she relocated for the final time to Los Angeles. She taught at various campuses of the California State University system and in 1969 joined the faculty at Scripps College, where she taught Chinese art history and African American art. Lewis retired from Scripps in 1984.

Los Angeles became the site of her most productive work. She produced her major works on Black art through her publishing company, Contemporary Crafts. She briefly worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but resigned after realizing that it would not change quickly enough; she also joined protests against that institution for its policies of racial exclusion. Moreover, she started various commercial art galleries that showcased some of the key figures of regional and national African American art. In 1975, Lewis founded the Museum of African American Art, a major institution featuring local and national Black artists and sponsoring symposia and other programs.

Lewis’s artwork reflected the social vision of her teaching, scholarship, and institution building. For more than a half-century, Lewis created a substantial body of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. These were figurative, narrative, and socially conscious like those she documented in her scholarship. Her images were often manifestations of civil rights and Black liberation. She regularly portrayed workers and mothers and ordinary African Americans struggling against institutional barriers of racism and sexism. She regularly employed symbols of raised fists and expressions of Black and worker dignity. She joined the long and honorable tradition of American artists of social conscience.

In African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis called upon artists to be major community resources and to create artworks that made sense to Black audiences. No statement better summarizes her enduring legacy of progressive artistic creativity and activism.

Jones, Kellie, editor. Now Dig This: Art in Black Los Angeles, 1960s to 1980s. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, UCLA, 2011.

Jones, Kellie. South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Riggs, Thomas, editor. St. James Guide to Black Artists. New York: St. James Press in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1997.

Von Blum, Paul. Resistance, Dignity, and Pride: African American Artists in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA, 2004.