Image: Claremont Museum of Art, Washington
Critic and educator Richard Allen May III will present a free public program examining the legacy of Dr. Samella Lewis on Saturday, October 3, from 4 to 5:30 p.m.
The lecture considers Lewis’s founding of a book of Black artists speaking in their own words, the National Conference of Artists, a scholarly journal, and a museum, treating each as an act of strategic institution-building. It uses SWOT analysis—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—to read each of these founding acts as strategy rather than endurance.
May notes that Lewis kept encountering rooms with no seat built for her—so she built the room herself. That framing begins with her repeated experience of entering spaces that had not been built to include her and her decision to build those spaces herself.
Dr. Lewis co-authored with Ruth Waddy the two-volume Black Artists on Art, founded the International Review of African American Art, and co-founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and the National Conference of Artists. The National Conference of Artists is described as the oldest extant congress of African American artists. Lewis became the first tenured African American professor at Scripps College in 1969 and retired in 1984.
The gallery includes Samella Lewis’s Black Sun, 1970, and Untitled (Back of Woman), 1942.
