Samella Lewis was an energetic artist, curator, collector and historian, and her manifold contributions to art history were extensive and deep.
once described as “a fundamental textbook for fledgling art historians desperate for information about artists who were not white, male and dead.”
Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director at the Museum of African American Art, the L.A. institution Lewis helped found, describes Lewis as a “soft-spoken powerhouse” who is “rightly regarded as the center of the universe for scholarship around Black art and artists.”Samella Lewis 1968 linocut, “Migrants,” was featured in the 2011 Hammer Museum exhibition “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980.
By 1940, Lewis had enrolled at Dillard University, a historically Black college where she met Elizabeth Catlett, who would become a lifelong mentor, colleague and close friend. Catlett, says Claude, “was almost like a grandmother to me.” She completed a master’s degree and a double doctorate — in fine arts and art history — at Ohio State . While completing her studies, she also met mathematician Paul Gad Lewis, whom she married in 1948, and to whom she would remain married until his death in 2013.
In 1970, she landed at Scripps College in Claremont, where she ultimately became the college’s first Black tenured professor.
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