Samella
Art historian, artist, and curator Samella Lewis, who played a vital role in shepherding the work of Black artists into the canon of American art, died of renal failure May 27 in Torrance, California, at the age of ninety-nine. Lewis, the author of the pathbreaking volumes Black Artists on Art (1969) and Art: African American […]
Placeholder while article actions load When Samella Lewis began teaching art history in the 1950s and ′60s, Black artists were often shut out of major American museums, passed over in favor of European masters and White abstract expressionists. Artists of color had few opportunities to reach a wide audience, she later recalled, and “there was […]
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