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Samella Lewis
Lewis in 1984
Born	Samella Sanders February 27, 1923 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Died	May 27, 2022 (aged 99) Torrance, California, U.S.
Education	Hampton Institute; Hampton University; Ohio State University
Occupation(s)	Artist, art historian
Spouse	Paul Gad Lewis (m. 1948–2013; his death)
Children	2

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Samella Sanders Lewis (February 27, 1923 – May 27, 2022) was an American visual artist and art historian. She worked primarily as a printmaker and painter. She has been called the "Godmother of African American Art".^[1] She received Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (CAA) in 2021.^[2]

“Art is not a luxury as many people think – it is a necessity. It documents history – it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” – Dr. Samella Lewis^[1]

Early life and background

Samella Sanders was born to Samuel Sanders and Rachel Taylor Sanders in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 27, 1923, and raised in Ponchatoula, Louisiana.^[3]^[4] Her father worked as a farmer and mother along other jobs worked as a domestic worker.^[3] Widely exhibited and collected as an artist herself, Lewis was better known as a historian, critic, and collector of art, especially African-American art. Lewis completed four degrees, five films, seven books, and a substantial body of artworks which have received critical respect. She pursued an art degree starting off at Dillard University in 1941, but left Dillard for Hampton Institute in Virginia, earning her master's degree in 1947. She earned her B.A. degree at Hampton University, then completed her master and doctorate in art history and cultural anthropology at the Ohio State University in 1951.^[5] Lewis was the first female African American to earn a doctorate in fine art and art history.^[6]

While finishing her doctorate, Lewis taught art at Morgan State University.^[7] Lewis became the first Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Florida A&M University in 1953;^[8] that same year Lewis also became the first African American to convene the National conference of African-American artists held at Florida A&M University.^[9] She was a professor at the State University of New York, California State University, Long Beach, and at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She co-founded, with Bernie Casey, the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in Los Angeles in 1970.^[5] In 1973, she served on the selection committee for the exhibition BLACKS: USA: 1973 held at the New York Cultural Center.^[10]

Lewis's grandson is Bay Area artist and musician Unity Lewis.^[6]^[11] He plans to create a contemporary version of Samella Lewis's catalog Black Artists on Art, which featured black artists not typically showcased in mainstream art galleries and sold thousands of copies.^[11] "I wanted to make a chronology of African American artists, and artists of African descent, to document our history. The historians weren't doing it. I felt it better the artists do it anyway, through pictorial and written information… It was really about the movement," Samella Lewis said of the book published in 1969 and 1971.^[12]

In 1960–70s, Samella Lewis belonged to a group of artists that would meet every month.^[9]

Lewis began collecting art in 1942. She mostly collected art from WPA and the Harlem Renaissance.^[9]

Career

In the 1960s and 1970s Lewis's work, which includes lithographs, linocuts, and serigraphs, reflected humanity and freedom. Between 1969 and 1970, Lewis and E.J. Montgomery were consultants for a "groundbreaking" exhibition creating awareness to the history of African American history and art.^[9]

Lewis was the founder of the International Review of African American Art in 1975. In 1976, she founded the Museum of African-American Art^[13] with a group of artistic, academic, business and community leaders in Los Angeles, California.^[5] These founders had similar goals, including increasing the public's awareness of African American art. Many individuals and corporations, such as Macy's, made generous donations to the museum.^[14] Lewis, as the staff's senior curator in the museum, not only organized a great number of exhibitions but also developed diverse ways of educating the public on African American arts. In an article, she discussed the ideas of "art of tradition", and argued that museums had the responsibility to explore the African roots of African American art.^[15] The museum operates on donations in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza with staff and volunteers who are dedicated to supporting the museum. Lewis once mentioned an "art of inspiration" based on the experiences of African Americans themselves.^[16] Lewis founded three other museums in the Los Angeles, California.^[9]

Lewis was an NAACP member, and a collector of art with her collection including African, Chinese, Asian, South American, and other works. Some of the art that Lewis collected was transferred to the Hampton Institute, now the University Museum.^[9]

In 1984, she produced a monograph on the artist Elizabeth Catlett,^[9] who had been one of Lewis's mentors at Dillard University.^[17]

In 2012, works by Lewis were exhibited alongside selected artworks from her personal collection in Samella Lewis and the African American Experience at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, California. The exhibition was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with text by art writer and critic Suzanne Muchnic.

In 2015, Unity Lewis and art entrepreneur Trevor Parham created The Legacy Exhibit, which featured three generations of black fine artists, including contemporary artists as well as some included in the original Black Artists on Art. The show launched their recruitment efforts for 500 black American artists to participate in the updated volumes.^[11]

Personal life and death

Lewis married mathematician Paul Gad Lewis in 1948 and they had two sons. He died in 2013. She died from renal failure in a hospice in Torrance, California, on May 27, 2022, at the age of 99.^[3]

Exhibitions

1969: Samella Lewis and George Clack, Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles
1980: Solo Exhibition, University Union Gallery, California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, California
1980: Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition, United States and Canada
1981: Solo exhibition, Pasadena City College, Pasadena, California
1981: Solo exhibition, University of California, San Diego
1984: African American Art in Atlanta, Public and Corporate Collections, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
1984: Solo exhibition, Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, California
2011: Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California^[18]
2012: Samella Lewis and the African American Experience, Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, California

Awards and recognition

1962: Fulbright Fellowship to study Asian culture at First Institute of Chinese Civilization and Tung Mai University, Taiwan
1964–65: National Defense Education Act postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California, studying Chinese language and Asian civilization
1993: Charles White lifetime Achievement Award
1995: UNICEF Award for the Visual Arts
1996–97: Named a Distinguished Scholar by the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities
2003: The History Maker Award
2004: Special Day Recognition Award for Outstanding Contributions from the City of New Orleans
2005: Alumni Association Award from the Ohio State University
2021: Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association^[2]

References

Robinson, Shantay (March 19, 2019). "Dr. Samella Lewis: The Godmother of African American Art". www.blackartinamerica.com. Archived from the original on February 28, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
Durón, Maximilíano (February 12, 2021). "Samella Lewis, Artist and Historian Focused on Advancing Black Art, Awarded CAA's Highest Honor". ARTnews.com. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
Miranda, Carolina A. (May 29, 2022). "Samella Lewis, 'godmother' of Black art who helped preserve its history, dies at 99". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 22, 2022.
Genzlinger, Neil (June 3, 2022). "Samella Lewis, Artist and Activist for Art World Diversity, Dies at 99". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 22, 2022.
Farrington, Lisa (2005). Creating their own image: the history of African-American women artists. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199767601.
Gael, Luis (September 20, 2016). "Bay area artist hopes to establish himself at Kaneko Gallery". The American River Current. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
Lewis, Samella S. interviewee; Cándida Smith, Richard; Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, compiler; J. Paul Getty Trust, publisher (1999). Image and belief : Samella Lewis. Getty Research Institute.
"Fine Arts Program - Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University 2018". www.famu.edu. Retrieved October 23, 2018.
Harris, Juliette. "The international review of African American art". Samella Lewis: An Art Institution in Her Own Right. 18: 14–15.
"BLACKS: USA: 1973 Opens at the Cultural Center". Chicago Metro News. September 29, 1973.
Drummond, Tammerlin (February 4, 2015). "Drummond: Oakland exhibit celebrates black fine art". The Mercury News. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
"Black Artists on Art: The Legacy Exhibit | OAKSTOP". oakstop.com. Archived from the original on February 7, 2017. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
"Museum of African American Art Los Angeles: Our History". www.maaala.org. Retrieved April 14, 2025.
Duersten, Matthew (August 30, 2019). "Welcome To The Museum Of Black Art Tucked Away In A Crenshaw Mall". LAist. Retrieved October 7, 2020.
"Lewis, Samella 1924– - Dictionary definition of Lewis, Samella 1924– | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
"The Museum of African American Art | Los Angeles". www.maaala.org. Archived from the original on February 7, 2017. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
"Samella Lewis | Now Dig This! digital archive | Hammer Museum". Hammer Museum. Retrieved October 23, 2018.
"Now Dig This!". Hammer Museum. Retrieved March 3, 2018.

Samella Lewis, Artist and Activist for Art World Diversity, Dies at 99

In addition to painting, she was a historian who pushed for a more inclusive definition of art, in part by founding her own museum devoted to Black artists.

Credit...Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

Samella Lewis in 1947 with some of her work. An important mentor was the artist Elizabeth Catlett.

By Neil Genzlinger

June 3, 2022

Samella Lewis, a Black artist and art historian who did more than just decry the racial blinders of the white art establishment, in part by founding a museum dedicated to promoting Black arts, died on May 27 in Torrance, Calif., near Los Angeles. She was 99.

Her son Claude Lewis said the cause was renal failure.

Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director of the Museum of African American Art, the institution Dr. Lewis founded in Los Angeles in 1976, noted her wide-ranging impact, calling her, in an email, “a leading voice in the scholarship on Black art, and a promoter of new pathways for Black artists.”

“She envisioned opportunities that did not yet exist for Black artists,” she added, “and then she created them.”

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In a remarkably varied career, Dr. Lewis also co-founded an arts journal, helped run galleries, made films about Black artists, taught at universities and wrote well-regarded books, most notably “Art: African American,” first published in 1978. That book (later republished as “African American Art and Artists”) remains influential, said Kellie Jones, a noted art historian at Columbia University, which, she said, is characteristic of Dr. Lewis’s various efforts: They have endured.

“Migrants,” 1968. A linoleum cut by Ms. Lewis. — Credit...Photo of artwork by Gerard Vuilleumier, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

“She starts a magazine: Still in print,” she said in a phone interview. “The museum: still there.”

“She did it all,” Dr. Jones added. “She really did it all.”

Samella Sanders was born on Feb. 27, 1923, in New Orleans to Samuel and Rachel Sanders. (Two oral histories give her birth year as 1924, but her son said that she came to believe that 1923 was correct.) Her father was a farmer, and her mother was a domestic worker.

She grew up in Ponchatoula, La., northwest of New Orleans, and was drawing from a young age. In an oral history recorded in 1992 by the Center for Oral History Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, she said her first sale of an artwork was to her kindergarten teacher, who was impressed with how she had handled an assignment to draw a pig.

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“All the other children were doing brown pigs, white pigs, so I drew a purple one,” she said. “And I was determined that, in doing that pig, that I was not going to stay within anybody’s lines. I just drew lines, but then I moved outside of them. It was like the pig was vibrating.”

She enrolled at Dillard University in New Orleans intending to study history, she said, but at the urging of her high school art teacher, she took a freshman art course. Her professor was the artist Elizabeth Catlett, who became an important influence artistically and in terms of activism. When they would ride the bus together, for instance, Ms. Catlett would do things like grab the “For Colored Patrons Only” sign demarcating the Black seats and throw it out the window — a revelatory action for a young student who had simply accepted the racial situation in Louisiana as the way things are.

“There I am sitting there, having grown up under these circumstances, and here this woman comes and disrupts the whole situation,” Dr. Lewis said in the oral history.

Ms. Catlett changed her approach to art as well.

“One of the important things I learned in Elizabeth’s class is that you don’t paint people without knowing something about them and who they are and where they are,” she said. “I was painting these portraits, and she would say, ‘Who is this?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what are you painting it for?’”

“The Garden,” 1962. — Credit...Photo of artwork by Gerard Vuilleumier, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

“Barrier,” 2004. — Credit...Photo of artwork by Gerard Vuilleumier, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

“Interior,” 1997. — Credit...Photo of artwork by Gerard Vuilleumier, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

“Stimulant,” 1941. — Credit...Photo of artwork by Gerard Vuilleumier, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

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After two years she transferred to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, earning a bachelor’s degree in art history there in 1945.

She went on to do graduate work at Ohio State University, first studying printmaking, then sculpture, although she encountered some resistance in that genre.

“I ran into problems of not only racism but also sexism,” she said, “where my professors felt that women shouldn’t do welding” because of the heavy equipment involved. So she focused on painting and on broadening her study of art history, developing particular expertise in Asian and pre-Columbian art. She earned a master’s degree there in 1948 — the year she married Paul G. Lewis, a mathematician — and in 1951 became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in fine arts and art history at the university. A posting on a university website once called her “the godmother of African-American art.”

In 1953 Dr. Lewis was appointed head of the art department at Florida A&M University, which needed bolstering. According to the book “African Americans in the Visual Arts” (2003), by Steven Otfinoski, she once told the university president that she would paint his portrait in exchange for more funding for her department.

The Lewises became active in civil rights issues, and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and others led them to leave Florida in 1958, when Dr. Lewis took a teaching post at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. In 1966 she took a post at California State University at Long Beach. That same year she made the first of several short documentaries, “The Black Artists,” a survey of African American art.

Though she was vocal about Black art and artists, Dr. Lewis said that, especially in her teaching, she tried to draw on her expertise in Asian art and other areas to make connections.

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“I never taught courses where I closed the door: ‘This is African art and this is Caribbean art,’” she said in the oral history. “I tried to show interrelationships.”

But as the 1960s turned more strident, so did she on the subject of white domination of the art world. In late 1968 she left academia to be the coordinator of education at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, hoping to elevate Black art there.

“Anybody can have a quick Black show,” she told The Los Angeles Times at the time, but she sought more substantive change. She lasted a little more than a year before quitting, so frustrated at the lack of progress that she picketed her own museum.

“We have gone through several periods — slavery, emancipation, underpaid and overworked, pacification, integration, trying to prove something instead of dwelling in our own household,” she told The Progress-Bulletin of Pomona, Calif., in early 1972. “I’m fed up with this proving of self.”

Ms. Lewis in her studio in 1976. “She envisioned opportunities that did not yet exist for Black artists,” a colleague said, “and then she created them.” — Credit...Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

In 1969, with Ruth Waddy, she published “Black Artists on Art,” forming her own publishing house, Contemporary Crafts, to do it. In it, Black artists spoke out, some vehemently, about their work and the obstacles they faced. The book (which was followed by a second volume in 1971) rattled the art establishment and the people who covered it, including William Wilson, art critic for The Los Angeles Times.

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“Statements by artists range from modest affirmations of a desire to make art of worth, to frankly militant rejections ‘of the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals who dominate the art scene’ and of white culture in general,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a review, in which he seemed to find the challenge thrown down by the book to be off-putting.

Dr. Lewis was also looking for ways around the white establishment. She had already helped establish the National Conference of Artists, a professional organization for Black artists, which continues today. And after leaving the Los Angeles museum, she was a founder of the Multi-Cul Gallery in Los Angeles, which focused on Black art and on selling works at prices almost anyone could afford.

In 1975 she and two others founded Black Art: An International Quarterly, which continues today under the name International Review of African American Art. Then, in 1976, came her Museum of African American Art, which has mounted exhibitions and run educational programs ever since.

Dr. Lewis resumed teaching in 1969 at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., where she remained for 15 years and which now houses the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection. Over the years she curated numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums.

And throughout her busy life, she found time to make her own art. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited in solo and group shows all over the country.

Her husband died in 2013. In addition to her son Claude, she is survived by another son, Alan, and three grandchildren.

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During a talk in Columbus, Ohio, in 2000, Dr. Lewis had a simple explanation for why people should respect artists of all races and backgrounds and try to hear what they are saying.

“They can tell us what will happen in the future,” she said. “They can tell us what we should have seen in the past.”