Champion of African American art dies

When Samella Lewis began teaching art history in the 1950s and ’60s, Black artists were often shut out of major American museums, passed over in favor of European masters and white abstract expressionists. Artists of color had few opportunities to reach a wide audience, she later recalled, and “there was no African American museum west of the Mississippi.”

So Lewis, a New Orleans native with a Ph.D. in fine arts, began building alternative institutions, aiming to promote and preserve the work of Black artists like Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence and her mentor, Elizabeth Catlett. Settling in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, she founded three galleries for artists of color, created the city’s Museum of African American Art, published a landmark survey of contemporary Black art and wrote one of the first textbooks on African American art history.

“Art is not a luxury as many people think,” she said, according to the website Black Art in America. “It is a necessity. It documents history — it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.”

Painter and printmaker

A tireless champion of African American art, Lewis was also an accomplished painter and printmaker in her own right, with works in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City. She was 99 when she died May 27 at a hospital in Torrance, Calif., after suffering a kidney ailment, according to her son Claude.

In a life that was guided by her devotion to art and social justice, Lewis taught in Jim Crow-era Florida while working with a Tallahassee branch of the NAACP — enraging members of the Ku Klux Klan, who shot out the windows of her home, according to her gallery Louis Stern Fine Arts.

Her activism continued after she moved to upstate New York, where she co-founded an NAACP chapter while teaching at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in the late 1950s, and after she moved to Southern California a few years later. While coordinating education programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she picketed the museum, according to her son, “because they had hardly any African American art — or any art by anyone of color.”

Made documentary films

To promote African American artists, Lewis made short documentary films about sculptors including Richmond Barthé and John Outterbridge. She also partnered with printmaker Ruth Waddy to interview dozens of artists for the book “Black Artists on Art” (1969), a two-volume survey of the contemporary scene that she released through Contemporary Crafts Gallery, a publishing house and exhibition space that she co-founded with actor Bernie Casey.

The book was intended “to promote change,” she wrote, “change in order that art might function as expression rather than as an institution” — and thereby serve entire communities, rather than amuse or enrich a privileged few. Her own work featured poignant depictions of African American life, including scenes of fieldworkers like the man portrayed in her 1968 linocut “Field,” who is shown raising his arms toward the sun and clenching one hand in a defiant fist.

“The artist is an interpreter,” Lewis later wrote, “a voice that makes intelligible the deepest, most meaningful aspirations of the people,” and “a channel through which their resentments, hopes, fears, ambitions, and all the other unconscious drives that condition behavior are expressed and become explicit.”

Lewis reached a wide audience with her 1978 textbook “Art: African American,” which built on the work of African American art historian James A. Porter and outlined more than two centuries of Black American art, beginning with the colonial era. Revised and expanded as “African American Art and Artists,” it became a staple of college classes, assigned in art and African American studies courses for years.

“Thanks to Samella Lewis,” artist and art historian Floyd Coleman wrote in a foreword for the book’s 2003 edition, “we gain deeper appreciation for and understanding of the richness and diversity that African American art adds to American civilization.”

The daughter of a farmer and a seamstress, Samella Sanders was born in New Orleans on Feb. 27, 1923. (Many sources give her birth year as 1924, although her son Claude said her birth certificate was given belatedly and incorrectly took a year off her age.)

While in high school, she met an Italian portrait painter, Alfredo Galli, after lingering at the window of his shop in the French Quarter. He spoke no English, she recalled in an oral history interview, but was impressed by her draftsmanship and taught her and a classmate free of charge for two years. “He really worked with us and warned us against the evils of modern art,” she said with a laugh. “But he taught us technique, and that was priceless.”

Lewis went on to study art at Dillard University in New Orleans, where she met Catlett and her then-husband, fellow artist Charles White. When the couple moved to Virginia to take a teaching job at the Hampton Institute (now a university), Lewis followed them, continuing her studies with further guidance from Viktor Lowenfeld, an influential art educator who taught her “to paint from the heart,” as she later told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

She received a bachelor’s degree in 1945 and later studied fine arts at Ohio State University, earning a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1951. Two years later, she helped organize the National Conference of Artists, a gathering of Black artists and teachers, while chairing the fine arts department at Florida A&M University.