Migrants
Linocut on paper
Support size: 22 1/4 x 29 1/8 inches; Image size: 17 1/4 x 24 inches
1968
Work on loan: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
As Exhibited in:
Edges of Ailey, 2024, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
Roots/Routes: Mobility and Displacement in Art of the American South, 2023, Richardson Family Art Center, Wofford Collecge, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; 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
Samella Sanders Lewis has received numerous honors over her lifetime. One 2011 tribute described her as an “iconic figure in American art” and sought to summarize her myriad contributions as an “educator, curator, museum founder, art historian, arts administrator and more. Her long distinguished career includes four degrees, five films, nine books, and a substantial body of artworks which have received great critical regard.” In all these pursuits, Lewis has been a peerless advocate for African American engagement with the arts.
A childhood spent in segregated New Orleans exposed Lewis to racial prejudice; as she matured, art offered a powerful vehicle to express her response to injustice. She was influenced early on by comic books, an affinity borne out in the graphic art she later created. In 1941, she enrolled at nearby Dillard University, where she met her mentor and lifelong friend Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett recognized Lewis’s remarkable potential and advised her to transfer to Hampton Institute. Lewis graduated from Hampton—where John Biggers was among her classmates—in 1945. At the recommendation of her instructor Viktor Lowenfeld, she immediately joined the school’s art faculty and taught for two years. Lowenfeld encouraged her to attend graduate school, suggesting Ohio State University. Lewis initially planned to pursue a printmaking degree but took so many courses in art history that she majored in “studio art history,” effectively combining two master’s degrees. She received her PhD from OSU in 1951, becoming the first female African American to earn a doctorate in art history. While completing her dissertation, Lewis taught at Morgan College in Baltimore. She moved to Tallahassee in 1953 to accept a faculty position at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. During her five years on campus, Lewis established and chaired the art department, which quickly became one of the largest available at an HBCU.
Lewis’s perpetual dedication to education led her to posts at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh and Scripps College in Claremont, California; she also served as the education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Frustrated by the lack of black representation in larger museums’ collections and staffs, in 1976 she founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, where she worked as senior curator until 1986. In order to publish her landmark 1969 two-volume guide Black Artists on Art (co-authored with Ruth Waddy), Lewis and a business partner opened Contemporary Crafts Gallery, the first African American-owned art publishing house. She launched the noted academic journal, International Review of African American Art, in 1976.
Accomplished in a variety of media, Lewis is best known as a printmaker. She often depicts human “figures that express ideas, feelings or social conflicts, not personalities.” Migrants, “inspired by a miserable group of Florida bean pickers seated in the back of a truck,” is representative of these anonymous portrayals turned powerful political commentary.