HName: Lewis, Samella
Placeborn: New Orleans, Louisiana
Datedied:
Placedied:
HDescrip: Curator and Historian of African-American art. Earning her doctorate in 1951 from Ohio University, Lewis became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in art history and fine art. As a practicing artist, she cultivated close relationships with several other African-American artists, including Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1919), her undergraduate mentor, and Romare Bearden (1914-1988). Lewis carefully documented her contact with artists through interviews, photographs, and manuscripts, creating a substantial archival resource for other scholars of African-American art. In 1953, she organized the first conference of African-American artists in the United States at Florida A & M University. In order to publish Black Artists on Art (1969), a two-volume collection of black artists’ writings, Lewis founded the first African-American owned art book publishing house, Contemporary Crafts. Her art history textbook, African-American Art and Artists (1978) chronicles the artistic production of African-Americans from the colonial era to the present. As a curator, she organized the first solo exhibition of Betye Saar (b. 1926), and established three galleries in the Los Angeles area, where she also served as one of the founders of the Museum of Afro-American Art. In 1976, she supervised the publication of the scholarly journal, Black Art: An International Quarterly, which became the International Review of African-American Art (IRAAA) in 1984. Because of her contributions to the field of African-American art history, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities commissioned an oral history of Lewis which was completed by Richard Candida Smith, chair of the University of Michgan’s history department. She is currently a professor of art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she became the first tenured African-American professor at the college, and an academic scholarship bears her name. LMW
HCountry: United States
HBiography: The International Review of African-American Art vol. 18, no. 1; [transcript] Samella Lewis. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA; “Samella Lewis,” Richmond Times Dispatch February 1, 2002.
HBibliography: African-American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; The Art of Elizabeth Catlett. Claremont, CA: Hancraft Studios, 1984; Black Artists on Art. (edited with Ruth G. Waddy), Los Angeles: Contemporary Crafts Publishers, 1969-1971.