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| Samella Lewis, Black Sun, 1970 |
This fall will see several museum shows exploring the history of Black artists in 20th-century Los Angeles. First to open is an exhibition at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art devoted to Samella Lewis (1923–2022), an artist, educator, art historian, curator, and museum founder. Lewis studied with Elizabeth Catlett in New Orleans and was run out of Florida by its governor (not the current one) for being woke. (She chaired the fine arts department at Florida A&M University.) Lewis ended up in Los Angeles, where she taught at CSU Long Beach and Scripps College, worked at LACMA, and founded the Museum of African American Art.
As an artist, Lewis is best known as a virtuosic printmaker in linocut, lithograph, and silkscreen. The Claremont Lewis exhibition will present Lewis' work alongside that of artists she taught or influenced. "Samella! Black as Lacquer and Iron" runs Aug. 15–Nov. 15, 2026.
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| Samella Lewis, untitled (Back of Woman), 1942 |
Comments
> LACMA
I wonder when that was? Perhaps when I was young and visited it with my family. That was the time we were in a elevator with a couple from out-of-town----although they could have been locals, but I vaguely recall an East-Coast-Noo-Yawk-type twang.
The woman said she was tired of looking at art. Her husband or boyfriend said something like, how come? She said going through a lot of bad art was tiresome.
Everyone in the elevator acted like (or so I imagined) someone had just farted. lol.
Back then I'd have assumed by the distant future - certainly in 2026 - things would have picked up for LACMA. But as much as things change, some things never change.
Now a visitor in 2026 writes that LACMA should be torn down. In 1965, various people reportedly felt the same way about Brown's/Pereira's campus. Then in 1986, when the mish-mosh of the Anderson Building (later Arts of America) was completed, some must have thought the same thing.
thefp .com:
...(LACMA), which was once the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi—but now, according to our columnist Caitlin Flanagan, looks more like a sinister garage sale.
Michael Govan...scoffs at that idea. To quote him: “We’re going to create knowledge by putting things in categories and distinguishing.” And so....artworks from wildly different eras and areas are jumbled up together, for no discernible reason:
“Sumerian relief structures next to black-and-white photographs and, depending on the day, a performance artist on a bicycle pedaling around.”
“Would it be churlish,” asks Caitlin, “to point out that if people hadn’t been creating knowledge by ‘putting things in categories and distinguishing,’ Govan wouldn’t be able to preside over a museum that hangs in midair?”
The truth is, if more of our museums fall to this destructive philosophy, future generations will never benefit from the knowledge that allowed Govan to take a sledgehammer to categories: the knowledge of how artists are linked, how one era followed another, how new styles were born.
”I visited the new LACMA three times over two weeks, and it radicalized me,” she writes in today’s essay. “Here was the first museum I’ve ever wanted to tear down.” [End quote]
"...performance artist on a bicycle pedaling around" is why it's even bigger crappola for Govan and his staffers to claim that artwork A or artwork B can't be displayed because the Geffen Galleries don't have the space.
LACMA's director and staffers are rubes.
Sooie, sooie. lol.
... Govan keeps better company than the hacks/rubes who write for or read The Free Press.
--- J. Garcin
Akin to learning the rules of writing, then how to break them...
The only problem I now have with the Geffen Galleries is it's arranged like a house without enough doodads for the walls and furniture for the living or dining room.
Govan and his staff may think that drinking lattes at Erehwon somehow offsets their lack of professionalism or sophistication. They is rubes.
LACMA's curatorial model is making a case for another way of thinking about things. This other way also produces knowledge.
I dare say, in general, that people rarely stop to think about how they think.
--- J. Garcin