Samella Lewis (1923–2022) – Artforum International
Artwork historian, artist, and curator Samella Lewis, who performed a significant function in shepherding the work of Black artists into the canon of American artwork, died of renal failure Could 27 in Torrance, California, on the age of ninety-nine. Lewis, the writer of the pathbreaking volumes Black Artists on Artwork (1969) and Artwork: African American (1978), was moreover the founding father of the Museum of African American Artwork in Los Angeles and a cofounder of the journal Black Artwork: An Worldwide Quarterly. She was additionally a professor at Scripps Faculty, the place she taught for practically fifteen years. By way of these endeavors, she ineluctably formed international and native perceptions of African American artwork historical past, opening up pathways and illuminating views that proceed to supply contemporary perception.
Samella Sanders was born in New Orleans on February 27, 1923. Her mom was a home employee and a seamstress, and her father was a sharecropper and a Methodist minister. Concerned about drawing from a really younger age, she discovered inspiration within the metropolis’s French Quarter, the place she took classes from an Italian portrait painter. In 1940, she enrolled in Dillard College, a traditionally Black faculty, the place she studied underneath Elizabeth Catlett, whom she adopted to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton College) in Virginia, acquiring her BA there in 1945. She subsequently moved north, incomes her grasp’s diploma and a double doctorate in positive arts and artwork historical past from Ohio State College. Whereas attending the varsity, she met mathematician Paul Gad Lewis, whom she married in 1948.
Following a number of instructing jobs at varied universities and some years spent instructing at Taiwan’s Tunghai College on a Fulbright Scholarship, Lewis arrived in Los Angeles, the place she taught at a number of completely different faculties whereas finding out Chinese language. In 1970, she grew to become the primary Black particular person to be named a tenured professor at Scripps Faculty in Claremont, California, the place she would stay by way of 1984. Lewis is credited with tremendously increasing the horizons of that establishment’s artwork division, instructing programs on African and Chinese language artwork, and bringing figures reminiscent of Maya Angelou and Jacob Lawrence to the college’s Clark Humanities, Museums, of which she was curator.
Concurrent together with her professorial life, Lewis based her personal publishing home, Up to date Crafts, after encountering a scarcity of curiosity by white-owned publishers in texts targeted on Black artists. She authored a variety of books, together with the aforementioned Black Artists on Artwork, for which she interviewed 150 African American artists about their practices, and Artwork: African American (revised and republished in 2003 as African American Artwork and Artists), which traced African American craft traditions relationship from the 1600s to the late Nineteen Seventies and stays essential studying at this time. In 1975, with Jan Jemison and Val Spaulding, she cofounded Black Artwork: An Worldwide Quarterly; the publication continues as Worldwide Overview of African American Artwork. “I felt that one thing needed to be finished to doc what African American artists had been doing,” she told filmmaker Eric Minh Swenson in 2016. “Not only for the artists however for the inhabitants. I felt that individuals might afford to purchase this, the place a few of them couldn’t afford to purchase the books.”
Lewis’s curatorial actions continued apace exterior of her work at Scripps. Disillusioned with a scarcity of racially inclusive values on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, at which she served as curator for a two-year stint starting in 1968, she went on to run artwork areas Multi-Cul, with Bernie Casey, and the Gallery, each of which had been instrumental in elevating the profiles of Black artists engaged on the West Coast at the moment. In 1976, she based the Museum of African American Artwork, which remains to be extant at this time.
Along with her work within the curatorial, professorial, and authorial fields, Lewis was an artist in her personal proper, and was well-known for her work and prints centering Black figures within the fashionable motion for civil rights whereas grounding them in an American historical past of enslavement. Her work is held within the assortment of the Ruth Chandler Williams Gallery at Scripps Faculty; the Museum of Trendy Artwork and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, each in New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork, amongst different establishments. In 2021, she acquired the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Faculty Artwork Affiliation.
At some point of her profession, Lewis remained a fierce advocate for entry to the humanities for all. “Artwork just isn’t a luxurious as many individuals assume,” she said. “It’s a necessity. It paperwork historical past—it helps educate folks and shops information for generations to come back.”
