Artist, art historian, curator, and educator Samella Lewis helped transform the study and public recognition of African American art. Her paintings and prints explored Black life through images of labor, family, community, and resistance, while her scholarship and institution building created opportunities for generations of artists. Across these interconnected pursuits, Lewis treated art as a means of preserving experience, challenging exclusion, and sharing knowledge. Her achievement encompasses both a substantial artistic practice and an enduring contribution to the infrastructure of American art history.

Born in New Orleans in 1923, Lewis developed an early interest in drawing while growing up in segregated Louisiana. At Dillard University, she studied with Elizabeth Catlett, who became a lifelong mentor and friend. She subsequently transferred to Hampton Institute, graduating in 1945 after studying with influential art educator Viktor Lowenfeld. Graduate study at Ohio State University followed; in 1951, Lewis became the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in art history. These formative experiences established a lasting connection between artistic expression, education, and cultural advocacy.

Lewis’s art remained closely connected to lived experience. Working in painting, drawing, linocut, lithography, and screenprinting, she portrayed people whose gestures and expressions conveyed both vulnerability and strength. Memories of Louisiana informed her imagery, while the civil rights movement gave urgency to works addressing freedom and racial inequality. In Field (1968), a field worker’s raised fist transforms an image of agricultural labor into a forceful statement of resistance. Other works, including Children’s Game (1968), emphasize companionship and hope. Her expressive range extended from boldly simplified forms to sensitively drawn faces, making the figure a vehicle for personal memory and collective experience.

Her teaching career included positions at Morgan State University, Florida A&M University, and the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. An expanding interest in Asian art led to a Fulbright fellowship in Taiwan and further study of Chinese language and art history. After settling in Southern California, Lewis joined Scripps College, where she became its first tenured Black professor. She taught until 1984, directed the Clark Humanities Museum, and mentored students including Alison Saar. Her teaching connected African American art with a wider understanding of African, Asian, and Indigenous artistic traditions.

Lewis’s publications changed how Black artists were documented and understood. With Ruth Waddy, she produced the two-volume Black Artists on Art (1969 and 1971), placing artists’ own statements alongside reproductions of their work. To support its publication, she helped establish Contemporary Crafts, an African American-owned art publishing enterprise. In 1976, she cofounded Black Art: An International Quarterly, later renamed The International Review of African American Art. Her textbook Art: African American (1978), subsequently revised as African American Art and Artists, became a foundational resource for students, scholars, and collectors.

As a curator and organizer, Lewis worked to correct the exclusion of Black artists from museums and galleries. She advocated for change while serving as an education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and established independent exhibition spaces. In 1976, she founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, serving as its senior curator until 1986. These initiatives gave artists opportunities to exhibit, reach audiences, and enter the historical record.

Lewis received the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021 and died in 2022 at ninety-nine. Her legacy continues through her publications, the institutions she established, and ongoing scholarship. The Getty Research Institute’s Samella Lewis: World Building in African American Art History project examines her wide-ranging influence. In 2026, the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art presented Samella! Black as Lacquer and Iron, bringing her drawings and prints into conversation with works by students, colleagues, and artists she championed.