“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

By Julian Lucas
Published 6/2/2022 8:32am PST

Dr. Samella Lewis, who many refer to as ˜The Godmother of Black Art,’ died at 99 years old in Torrance, California.

Though her influence was international and national, those who knew her in this region associated her with the Southern California Black Art scene. A professor of art at various colleges across the country, including Cal States Long Beach and Dominguez Hills in California, she was the first black tenured professor at Scripps College, one of the Claremont Colleges, where she taught from 1969 until her retirement in 1984. Recently, in 2021, Samella Lewis was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the College Art Association.

In 2007, Scripps College launched the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection in her honor with a focus on African American art, emphasizing woman artists. The collection features Lewis’ own works along with works by Alison Saar, Elizabeth Catlett, John Outterbridge, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems among others. Lewis was instrumental in helping Scripps secure works by Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence for their permanent collection.

Born and raised in the Bayou region of Louisiana, in the small rural town of Ponchatoula, known for its strawberry fields some fifty miles from New Orleans, her mother left her and her three sisters when she was four. She said it was a lot for her father to contend with - particularly her, because she was always crying for her mother. However, she also said that she understood because her mother was a cosmopolitan woman and couldn’t live in such an isolated place.

As a child, she poured over comic books, and she studied the characters in her elder sister's romance novels. And as a teenager, she started spending time in the French quarters of New Orleans looking at the art people were making. It was a ‘red light’ district so, at her high school teacher’s urging, she always took along a male student to accompany her. One day, the two of them looked in a window and saw a black woman, who asked them in. The woman, Rosa, introduced them to the Italian portrait artist, Alfredo Gali, whom she was living with, and Gali ended up giving them both free art lessons for two years.  

Art became a mechanism for her to deal with the realities of life for a Black person, the monotonous, menial work in the field, the police brutality against Black people and segregation.

In 2016, looking back on her past said, “I don’t want to be young again. A lot of things happened.” And, “there are experiences that I would rather have not had . .  . but I realized I was meant to have these experiences and I survived them because there was always someone around that loved me.” And: “We were chased out of a lot of places. It was still Jim Crow.”

She didn’t start out as an art student at Dillard University, a historically, all-black college in New Orleans, but she gravitated to it, mentored by the notable artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. Catlett was her primary teacher and Catlett’s emphasis on everyday people, sharecroppers, migrant workers, domestic workers and such, rather than ‘important’ people influenced her. Catlett, even though she herself was middle class, focused on people who weren’t, and her focus on other Black issues - motherhood, justice, segregation, discrimination influenced Lewis

At Dillard, Catlett infused Lewis with the idea that they were making history, and she encouraged Lewis to collect the work of Black artists even as an undergraduate. Lewis says she has been collecting art since 1942 and by the end of her life, she managed to amass a major collection of Black Art. 

Lewis earned an undergraduate at Hampton Institute and a masters and teaching degree at Morgan College. At a fairly young age, she received two doctorate degrees in art history and visual arts. Lewis’ career was a series of firsts - she was the first Black American to get a PhD in art attending Ohio State.

In the South, Lewis taught art at Morgan State University in Baltimore and  Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, where she was very active with the NAACP. Her anti-segregationist activism made her a target — and in the late 1950s, members of the Ku Klux Klan shot out the windows of the family’s home. Her husband said, “We had to get out of there.” 

In the process of bringing greater attention to Black artists, she encouraged people to look at artistic traditions beyond Europe. Two stints - one as a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan in the 60s and as a visiting professor in Brazil in the 70s, broadened her expertise and outreach. 

In Taiwan, she described opening up crates of old Chinese artworks that Chiang Kai-shek had brought with him when he retreated from mainland China. In China, she became entranced with the Mugao Caves, a collection of nearly 500 caves that contain the largest depositary of historic documents along the Silk Roads. She carried back with her a scroll with 13 Buddhas - one black. All of the Buddhas had golden halos but the black one. When she asked people about this, the typical answer was that they had not noticed.

In Brazil, Lewis delivered lectures, learned Portuguese and said she would have liked to have lived there.

In 1968, Lewis was hired at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, as the education coordinator. While there, she hoped to increase exhibition opportunities for Black artists, but Lewis resigned in protest at the dearth of black representation in major museum collections and staff, saying, “We were not included in the art museum here.”

As a reaction to her experiences and to the lack of adequate resources at the time, Lewis wrote a textbook of African American art. She said, 

"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.”

And:

“Compiling those books about Black artists and writing the art history of African American art wasn’t done for career objectives—it was a necessity.”

She eventually moved on to publishing periodicals on Black Art, realizing that she wanted something affordable that people could pick up on a regular basis, even when they could not afford a book. Her family describes it as ‘a family operation’ - with everyone pitching in with compiling, mailing, shipping, etc. She also founded galleries and book stores, and in 1976, she established the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles in 1976, and served as its primary curator until 1986.

Lewis’ own work focused on portraiture. She didn’t work from live models or photographs, but worked from her inner imagination to create works that reflected what she felt inside - remembrances of people she met that resonated with her emotionally. She would start with a blank canvas, and a character would slowly emerge for her to explore. In her studio, pulling out her own work, she would refer to these characters as ‘weak’ or ‘strong.’ She was documenting survivors.

Those who studied with her at Scripps remember her for her hands-on style of teaching. In the basement of the Claremont Colleges, she would place art objects from their collection in students' hands for them to examine for themselves. One former student remembers her pressing small Zuni fetish figures into their hands as she talked about their economy of form and their deep connection between the human and animal world.

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, creative strategist, and writer in training, but mostly a photographer. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking unhoused veterans to housing.