In 1970, she became the first Black person to be named a tenured professor at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she would remain through 1984. While attending the school, she met mathematician Paul Gad Lewis, whom she married in 1948.įollowing several teaching jobs at various universities and a few years spent teaching at Taiwan’s Tunghai University on a Fulbright Scholarship, Lewis arrived in Los Angeles, where she taught at several different colleges while studying Chinese. She subsequently moved north, earning her master’s degree and a double doctorate in fine arts and art history from Ohio State University. In 1940, she enrolled in Dillard University, a historically Black college, where she studied under Elizabeth Catlett, whom she followed to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, obtaining her BA there in 1945. Interested in drawing from a very young age, she found inspiration in the city’s French Quarter, where she took lessons from an Italian portrait painter. Her mother was a domestic worker and a seamstress, and her father was a sharecropper and a Methodist minister. Samella Sanders was born in New Orleans on February 27, 1923. Through these endeavors, she ineluctably shaped global and local perceptions of African American art history, opening up pathways and illuminating perspectives that continue to offer fresh insight. She was also a professor at Scripps College, where she taught for nearly fifteen years. Lewis, the author of the pathbreaking volumes Black Artists on Art (1969) and Art: African American (1978), was additionally the founder of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and a cofounder of the journal Black Art: An International Quarterly.
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.
0 kommentar(er)
