Historian Samella Lewis, who supported Black artists, dies at 99

The expression “Renaissance lady” is an overused one — usually deployed in reference to anybody who may need a toe in a couple of topic space. However when it got here to Samella Lewis, it was true.

Lewis was an artist, an activist, a historian, an creator, a curator, a professor, a gallerist, a collector and a beloved mentor who helped doc and elevate work by Black artists for nearly eight a long time. A down-to-earth but steely lady who helped combine Black artists into the American canon, Lewis died of renal failure on Friday at a hospice in Torrance. She was 99.

The dying was confirmed by her youthful son, Claude Lewis.

Over the course of her profession, she printed essential books on Black artists, together with a monograph about one among her mentors, Elizabeth Catlett, a twentieth century graphic artist and sculptor famend for sleek, highly effective portrayals of Black ladies. Lewis was additionally the drive behind “Artwork: African American,” launched in 1978 (and revised in 2003 as “African American Artwork and Artists”), which has develop into a key textual content on the historical past on Black artwork in america — one which Pittsburgh arts author Nadine Wasserman as soon as described as “a basic textbook for fledgling artwork historians determined for details about artists who weren’t white, male and useless.”

For a time, within the early Seventies, Lewis ran the L.A. artwork areas Multi-Cul and the Gallery, which have been essential platforms for burgeoning Los Angeles artists — amongst them Betye Saar, a standard-bearer of the Black Arts Motion. In 1976, Lewis based the Museum of African American Artwork, a community-minded artwork house, now tucked contained in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall, that over time has given exhibitions to artists akin to Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé and Religion Ringgold.

Lewis knew the artwork of the Caribbean; she additionally spoke Chinese language — a language she picked up within the early Sixties after a stint in Taiwan on a Fulbright and thru post-graduate research in Chinese language language, philosophy and historical past on the College of Southern California. All through, she made artwork: work, lithographs, linocuts and serigraphs, delving into abstraction however most regularly creating works that centered the Black determine.

“Artwork is a language like poetry, evoking sensitivities and recollections,” Lewis instructed The Occasions in 1995. “Artwork actually helps to talk to the previous, current and to a big extent helps to information you into the long run.”

Samella Lewis’ “Stimulant,” from 1941 — an early portray by the artist.

(Gerard Vuilleumier / Louis Stern Effective Arts)

The information of her dying generated an outpouring of tributes from artists and curators on social media. “She was a large!” wrote Chicago photographer Dawoud Bey in an Instagram publish. Kara Tucina Olidge, director of the Amistad Analysis Heart in New Orleans, described her as “a life drive in inventive imaginative and prescient.”

Naima J. Keith, now a vp of schooling and public applications on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, had the chance to work with Lewis when she served as curatorial fellow on the 2011 Hammer Museum exhibition “Now Dig This! Artwork and Black Los Angeles 1960-80″. Lewis, says Keith, “labored tirelessly as an artist, collector, historian and curator, serving to kind a brand new space of research for a form of artwork that mainstream establishments had chosen to disregard. Her work has modified African American artwork historical past endlessly.”

Keasha Dumas Heath, government director on the Museum of African American Artwork, the L.A. establishment Lewis helped discovered, describes Lewis as a “soft-spoken powerhouse” who’s “rightly thought to be the middle of the universe for scholarship round Black artwork and artists.”

“She represents the start and the center of that work.”

Samella Lewis 1968 linocut, “Migrants,” was featured within the 2011 Hammer Museum exhibition “Now Dig This!: Artwork and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980.”

(Gerard Vuilleumier / Louis Stern Effective Arts)

Samella Lewis was born Samella Sanders in New Orleans on Feb. 27, 1923. She was the daughter of Samuel Sanders, a farmer, and Rachel Taylor Sanders, who, amongst different jobs, did home work. Many publications, on-line and in any other case, checklist Lewis’ delivery yr as 1924, however that’s incorrect, says her son Claude. “Again when she was born in Louisiana,” he says, “Black folks didn’t have delivery certificates.” When she lastly did get one, the doc shaved a yr off her age.

As a younger woman, Lewis was enraptured by artwork. “From 4 years previous I used to be drawing,” she instructed a reporter from the Richmond-Occasions Dispatch in 1997 — usually reimagining pictures she discovered elsewhere. “I’d redraw them and make them my very own.”

When she obtained older, she frolicked within the metropolis’s French Quarter, observing artists at work. There, an Italian portrait painter by the title of Alfredo Gali took a liking to her and gave her classes.

By 1940, Lewis had enrolled at Dillard College, a traditionally Black school the place she met Elizabeth Catlett, who would develop into a lifelong mentor, colleague and shut good friend. Catlett, says Claude, “was virtually like a grandmother to me.”

In 1943, Catlett, who was then married to painter Charles White, took a job on the Hampton Institute in Virginia (now Hampton College), the place she taught sculpture whereas White labored on his nice mural, “The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America.” Lewis ended up following her mentor there, in the end finishing her undergraduate diploma at Hampton in 1945.

She taught for a time at Hampton, the place she turned buddies with artwork schooling theorist Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish refugee from Austria who had fled the Nazis. In interviews, she cited him as good friend and essential affect. Lowenfeld, she as soon as stated, “taught his college students to not really feel they needed to produce artwork to please anybody, however paint from the center.”

It was Lowenfeld who instructed she pursue additional research at Ohio State College.

Artist, educator, historian and curator Samella Lewis in 1997.

(Claude Lewis)

What adopted was a flurry of educational work that will take her everywhere in the nation and everywhere in the world — and in the end lead her to Los Angeles.

She accomplished a grasp’s diploma and a double doctorate — in advantageous arts and artwork historical past — at Ohio State (the place one among her classmates was future Pop maestro Roy Lichtenstein). Whereas finishing her research, she additionally met mathematician Paul Gad Lewis, whom she married in 1948, and to whom she would stay married till his dying in 2013.

Instructing gigs adopted at Morgan Faculty in Baltimore (now Morgan State College) and Florida A&M College in Tallahassee, the place she was energetic with the NAACP. That activism made her a goal — and within the late Fifties, members of the Ku Klux Klan shot out the home windows of the household’s house, Claude says. “We needed to get out of there.”

They ended up in Plattsburgh, N.Y., the place Lewis taught at SUNY Plattsburgh. There, she based a chapter of the NAACP. “We have been the one Black household in Plattsburgh they usually began a department of the NAACP,” Claude marvels. “It was us and a gaggle of white folks.”

Within the Sixties, the Fulbright took her to Taiwan, the place she labored at Tunghai College, after which she managed to make a go to to mainland China — a uncommon journey for an American on the time. In 1964, Lewis and her household settled in Los Angeles, the place she studied Chinese language at USC and labored a succession of instructing jobs at numerous universities, together with Cal State Lengthy Seaside and Cal State Dominguez Hills.

In 1970, she landed at Scripps Faculty in Claremont, the place she in the end turned the faculty’s first Black tenured professor.

Samella Lewis was an artist who impressed others. Seen right here, a block print by John T. Scott titled “Samella Lewis,” 2004.

(Scripps Faculty)

Her affect at Scripps is the stuff of legend. She expanded the artwork historical past choices past the Western canon, instructing programs in African artwork and Chinese language artwork. She served as curator of the varsity’s Clark Humanities Museums, the place she invited writers and artists akin to Jacob Lawrence, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni to current work and provides lectures.

Artist Alison Saar says Lewis was instrumental in getting her to attend Scripps and, in the end, helped pave the way in which for her to develop into an artist. When she enrolled at Scripps, Saar was positive she would develop into a historian. However her programs with Lewis flipped a swap. “She uncovered us to African artwork, permitting us to have hands-on entry,” she recollects. “As a part of class, we curated an exhibition on African artwork. Having the ability to be round these objects and dealing with them and understanding the supplies and having that hands-on expertise — that basically knowledgeable my work.”

In 2007, the college’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery — on the urging of alumnae akin to Saar and Susan Rankaitis — established the Samella Lewis Modern Artwork Assortment in her honor. The gathering options work by many artists, together with Lewis — in addition to work donated by Lewis from her private assortment, together with an evocative 1983 woodcut by Catlett titled “Survivor,” which reveals a pensive Black lady, her hair bundled in a shawl, clutching a brush deal with.

Mary MacNaughton, a former Scripps professor who served as director of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery from 1993 to 2021, and helped set up the gathering in Lewis’s honor, says Lewis was essential for the methods by which she supported fellow artists — as a curator, as a historian, but additionally an essential collector of labor by Black artists. (She began amassing within the Forties.) MacNaughton says Lewis was the kind who “noticed a necessity” and “crammed it.”

“She is so essential,” she provides. “A brilliant mild went out.”

Samella Lewis’ “Inside,” 1997.

(Gerard Vuilleumier / Louis Stern Effective Arts)

Lewis’s struggle for illustration would bear fruits for numerous artists — together with herself.

Within the late Sixties she labored within the schooling division on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, however grew weary of the methods the museum continued to miss work by Black artists. Annoyed, she left LACMA in 1970 — serving to set up the activist group Involved Residents for Black Artwork. On not less than one event, she picketed the museum in protest.

The disillusioning expertise of working for a legacy establishment led her to create her personal alternatives. These embrace her many printed books, as effectively the journal “Black Artwork: Worldwide Quarterly” — which remains to be ongoing as “The Worldwide Evaluation of African American Artwork,” managed by Hampton College.

The establishments, nevertheless, finally got here calling. In 2011, her work materialized in “Now Dig This!” on the Hammer Museum, organized by scholar and curator Kellie Jones. The next yr, Louis Stern Effective Arts in West Hollywood displayed an in depth assortment of her work. However probably the most satisfying invites got here from LACMA itself: a portray by Lewis appeared within the 2021 exhibition “Black American Portraits.”

Her portray “Bag Man,” from 1996, options the determine of a Black man towards an inky blue backdrop. On his again, he carries a brilliant yellow sack; on his face, a glance of irritated willpower.

“It’s a terrific full circle story,” says Claude, an artist and musician. “I used to be so glad that she was capable of see that occur.”

Along with serving on the boards of the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts and the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, she was the recipient of quite a few honorary levels. Final yr, the Faculty Artwork Assn. offered her its Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Lewis by no means stopped extolling the facility of artwork.

“We even have an obligation to see that valuing and amassing our artwork is a major side of nurturing,” she as soon as instructed Essence. “We should familiarize ourselves with our historic and modern artwork so as to perceive and know ourselves.”

Lewis is survived by her son Claude; her older son, Alan Lewis, a retired schoolteacher; and three grandchildren: Unity Lewis, Gabriella Angela Lewis and Gian Carlo Lewis.