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Samella Lewis was the ‘godmother of African American art’ [1]
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Date: 2025-03-26
Samella Lewis in 1984. Credit: Penni Gladstone, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Samella Lewis did not see art as a luxury.
Instead, the artist and art historian described art as a necessity because it documents history, educates people and stores knowledge for future generations.
Lewis’ “heritage led her to view art as an essential expression of the community and its struggles,” the Samella Lewis website states.
Called “Godmother of African American Art,” Lewis was born in New Orleans in 1927. She grew up in Ponchatoula, La., returning to New Orleans in 1941 to attend Dillard University.
Two years later, Lewis left Dillard – following the suggestion of her mentor and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett – to attend Hampton Institute in Virginia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art history in 1945. She also earned a master’s degree from Ohio State University in 1947, and became the university’s first Black woman to earn a doctorate in fine arts and art history in 1951.
Throughout her career, Lewis collected and studied art while empowering “Black scholars, artists, students and people in general to see African American visual production as an integral feature of American art history,
a 2023 article in the Progressive Magazine states. “She was one of the few –– possibly the last –– art historians to research and write an encyclopedic work on the range of African American artists.”
Well known for her own art, Lewis’ paintings and prints centered “Black figures in the modern movement for civil rights while grounding them in an American history of enslavement,” Art Forum states.
According to the New York Times, Lewis co-founded an arts journal, ran galleries, made films about Black artists, taught at universities and wrote several books. She also founded her own publishing company, Contemporary Crafts, in 1969; and founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles in 1976.
Lewis died in 2022 in Torrance, Calif.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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