Samella S. Lewis papers

Samella Sanders Lewis, African American artist, author, curator, and educator, was born February 27, 1923, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The daughter of Samuel Sanders and Rachel Sanders, Samella was an honor student at McDonogh Senior High School. She received a Delta Sigma Theta scholarship, which she used to attend Dillard University in New Orleans for two years. She won an art scholarship from the Hampton Institute in 1943 and moved to the Virginia-based school where she completed her Bachelor of Science in art in 1945. Among her contemporary classmates was John Biggers, whose papers Emory also holds.

Lewis began her professorial career as an instructor in the Hampton Institute art department the year after her graduation. In 1947 she began work on her M.A. in art at Ohio State University, receiving her degree in 1948. That same year she married Paul G. Lewis and moved to Los Angeles, where she taught at Cal State Long Beach while finishing her doctoral dissertation. Lewis became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in art history in 1951 from Ohio State.

In 1953 Lewis took a position at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, where she developed the art department and became increasingly involved in the local NAACP chapter. Lewis took a position at the State University of New York--Plattsburgh, where she taught art history and humanities from 1958-1968 and used post-doctoral fellowships to expand her expertise to encompass Asian art in addition to African art and art of the African diaspora.

In 1968 Lewis moved with her family back to Los Angeles, where she worked briefly as the education coordinator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She accepted an appointment as Professor of Art History at Scripps College in the Claremont College system in 1969, where she remained until her retirement from academia in 1984.

Lewis is known primarily as a painter but was also a printmaker working with lithographs and linocuts. In 1970 she founded the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in Los Angeles and then, six years later, founded the Museum of African American Art while also working there as chief curator.

Lewis, a distinguished author of art history books, published her first book, Black Artists on Art, in 1969. She has written books, articles, lectures, and essays on art and artists of the African diaspora, including textbooks Art: African American (1978) and African American Art and Artists(2003), the children's non-fiction book African American Art for Young People (1991), and the artist biographies The Art of Elizabeth Catlett (1984) and Barthé: His Life in Art (2009). She also founded and edited The International Review of African American Art, and founded Hancraft Studios, which produced books, prints and greeting cards.

Following her retirement from academia, Lewis curated exhibitions for museums and galleries in the United States and abroad, including exhibitions dedicated to artists such as Richmond Barthé, Richard Hunt, Palmer C. Hayden, and Jacob Lawrence. She has also received awards and honors from colleges and universities, including Hampton University, University of Cincinnati, and Spelman College. She was awarded the 1993 Charles White Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1995 UNICEF Award for the Visual Arts, and served as a distinguished scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1997.