Norman Lewis

Norman Wilfred Lewis was born on the twenty-third of July 1909 at Harlem, the second of three sons of Wilfred Lewis — a Bermudian-born immigrant who arrived at New York in 1906 as a Brooklyn Navy Yard dock foreman — and Diana Lewis, a Bermudian-born seamstress. He was raised in the early Caribbean West Indian Harlem at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue.

He was placed at six at the Harlem Public School 89 and at the Dewitt Clinton High School at the Bronx, completing the secondary education there in 1928. He took two years of merchant-marine service from 1929 to 1931 as a stevedore-and-bosun’s-mate on the merchant routes of the Caribbean and South American Atlantic coasts. He returned to Harlem in 1931 and entered the Augusta Savage (placed in this archive) Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts at 163 West 143rd Street in late 1933.

He was the first Savage student to begin systematic exhibition outside the Studio — beginning with the 306 Group of artists led by the painter Charles Alston (placed in this archive) at the Group’s 306 West 141st Street studio loft from 1934. The 306 Group was the principal Harlem-Renaissance painters’ circle of the late 1930s, and Lewis was one of its principal members alongside Alston, Romare Bearden (placed in this archive), and Jacob Lawrence (placed in this archive).

He took employment in 1936 at the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration at New York as an easel painter on the Harlem Community Art Center, and from 1944 to 1949 at the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Science at New York as an art teacher.

He was admitted in April 1946 to the Willard Gallery at 32 East Fifty-Seventh Street, Manhattan — the principal New York Modernist gallery of the immediate post-war period, run by Marian Willard — and was the only Black painter at the Willard. He held the first of his five Willard solo exhibitions in May 1949.

He was one of the twenty-eight invited participants of the three-day Studio 35 closed-door artists’ conference at the Wakefield Gallery, 35 East Eighth Street, Manhattan, on the twenty-first to the twenty-third of April 1950 — the founding conclave of the New York School of abstract expressionism. Lewis was the only Black painter in the conference, alongside Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and twenty-two others.

He completed across the following twenty-five years the principal abstract works of his career — among them the Civil Rights series of 1959–1963 (including American Totem, 1960, on the white-hooded Klan), the Procession series of the 1960s, and the Block paintings of the 1970s.

He co-founded in 1963 with the painter Romare Bearden and the painter Hale Woodruff (placed in this archive) the Spiral Group at New York — the Black artists’ collective that produced in 1964 the exhibition Black and White at the Christopher Street Gallery in support of the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Bill.

He taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1972 to 1979.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-seventh of August 1979 of complications of cancer, at seventy.

He is honored here as the only Black founding member of the New York School.