Erusion
Watercolor on paper
Support size: 14 x 19 inches; Image size: 12 x 16 5/8 inches
1938
As exhibited in:
The League of Extraordinary Artists, 2024, Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, 2018–2019, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida, 2018, New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, New York, 2019, Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania, 2019
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2023, Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
The sole African American artist active with the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Norman Wilfred Lewis used his art to transcend racial barriers and promote a universal human condition. Best known for his gestural calligraphic brushwork, expressive use of line, and bold color choices, Lewis at first painted in a figurative, realist style before adopting a non-representational practice.
Born in Harlem to parents of Caribbean descent, Lewis grew up during the burgeoning cultural renaissance in that borough. After high school, he joined a merchant ship that traveled throughout Central and South America. After his return to Harlem in the early 1930s, Lewis sculpted beside Augusta Savage before enrolling in painting courses at Columbia University. By 1934, Lewis had made the transition from student to instructor, leading courses at Savage’s Studio of Arts and Crafts and at the Harlem Community Arts Center.
During the Depression, Lewis was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. In October 1938, he and fellow artist Rex Goreleigh were “loaned” under FAP auspices to two Southern HBCUs: the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina and the all-female Bennett College, both located in Greensboro. The virulent racism Lewis encountered there led him to leave the city after three months. Official statements about Lewis’s departure cited family illness as the cause. An internal memo in FAP director Holger Cahill’s papers noted another reason: “Norman Lewis found it impossible to adjust himself to the manners and customs of the Southern Negro.” Lewis would later leave a war production job in Vancouver, Washington, due to racism, saying “it was too hard for a Negro to be anything but a laborer.”
When the WPA ceased operations in 1943, Lewis joined the faculty at New York’s progressive George Washington Carver School, where his colleagues included Elizabeth Catlett, Hale Woodruff, and Charles White. Decades later, Lewis taught classes at the Art Students League in the 1970s. His colleagues and students remembered him as a “stimulating and challenging teacher who . . . has the highest degree of artistic integrity and devotes himself most consciously the problems of his art.”
As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Lewis and several other African American artists—formed Spiral, a black artists’ collective, in 1963; Lewis served as the group’s first president. While the group was short-lived, Lewis continued to foster African American artists by teaching at the antipoverty organization Harlem Youth in Action and co-founded the Cinque Gallery, an arts space dedicated to emerging black artists.