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2. Early life and education
Norman Wilfred Lewis was born on July 23, 1909 in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, New York. He was raised on 133rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Both of his parents were from Bermuda, his father Wilfred Lewis, was a fisherman and later a dock foreman and his mother Diane Lewis, was a bakery owner and later a domestic worker. He had two brothers and Norman was the middle child, his eldest brother Saul Lewis became violinist, later playing jazz music with notable musicians such as Count Basie and Chick Webb. Lewis attended Public School No. 5, which at the time was a primarily white student population. He was always interested in art, but he did not express it in early childhood due to a lack of resources and of being overshadowed by his older brother with musical talent.
As a young man, he started studying art through self education and he had amassed a few commercial art books, initially he would practice drawing from them. Often he would get frustrated by the level of detail he was not able to achieve when compared to the commercial art, unaware that he was copying the art at a different scale than they were produced. He later started studying art history books with more success. Self education of art got him started in his career but it later complicated his relationship with teachers and other students, and he struggled with full understanding of some of the learnings. A lifelong resident of
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Harlem, starting around age 20 he also traveled extensively during the three years that he worked on ocean freighters. As a seaman he traveled to South America and the Caribbean.
When he returned from sea, he got a job as a textile and garment presser in a tailor's studio and it was there he met artist Augusta Savage because her art studio was in the basement of the tailors shop. He studied art with Augusta Savage at Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem. Savage, was an important early influence who provided him with open studio space at her Harlem Community Art Center. Lewis was a member of 306 Group in 1934, a collection of African American artists and writers who discussed art's role in society. Some well-known members were Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence, and Richard Wright, as well as Charles Alston, who hosted the meetings in his studio. In 1935, he was a co-founder of the Harlem Artists Guild, whose members included Romare Bearden, Selma Burke, and Beauford and Joseph Delaney.
Between 1933–1935, he studied at Teachers College, Columbia University and at the John Reed Club Art School.
He also participated in Works Progress Administration as an art teacher starting in 1935, alongside Jackson Pollock, among others. One of the places he worked at during his time in the WPA was the Harlem Community Art Center.
After Works Progress Administration came to an end in 1943, Lewis found a job teaching at the newly established George Washington Carver School, a community school for students from low-income families in Harlem, where his colleagues included artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, among others. From 1944 to 1949, he taught art at the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Science.
Lewis was hailed as a transformative teacher; groups of students would regularly follow him out of his classes and cluster around him to keep listening to his thoughts about art. He began his long and decorated career as an educator by teaching at the Augusta Savage House and Studio. Eventually, he began working to promote the careers of rising African artists with the 306 group, a Harlem salon of notable artists and writers which included Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, and Ralph Ellison. In 1935, Lewis and some members of this group established the Harlem Artists Guild, which was instrumental in opening the Harlem Community Arts Center—where Lewis himself taught art courses.
During this time, Lewis’ art turned to social realism. Inspired by jazz, African sculpture, and cubism, Lewis painted quotidian figures and scenes with the intent of revealing social truths. His 1933 work, The Wanderer (Johnny), is an example. Head down and huddling over the small fire, the man is exposed to the harsh winter that is portrayed in the painting’s upper right-hand corner. Lewis communicates a heaviness in this painting; the “wanderer” is hunched over, covered in snow. This weighty sensation might echo the glaring racial oppression of that time. But also, it relays the especially disadvantaged position African Americans had during the Great Depression, where their unemployment rate at times tripled the rate for white citizens. Lewis powerfully manipulates space in this
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work, denying the viewer mobility and forcing them to face this social commentary head-on.
In the early 1940s, Lewis began teaching at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, a school for local students who came from low-income family backgrounds. He also joined the faculty at the Jefferson School for Social Science, a school for adults focusing on Marxist education; W.E.B. Dubois began offering classes there in 1952. At this time, Lewis’ art began to divert from the sober aesthetic of his earlier realist paintings, moving toward abstraction. In Meeting Place (1941), one can see that Lewis does not totally drop representation, as he implies figuration—albeit in a stylized, unconventional way.
Lewis was one of few well-known Black voices in this new artistic movement, inevitably challenging racial inequality in institutional American art. In 1950, he was the only African American artist that took part in the famous “Artist Sessions” at Studio 35 on New York’s East Eighth Street. It was in these meetings where Lewis—and artists such as Hans Hoffman, Robert Motherwell, Hedda Sterne, and Louise Bourgeois—coined the term “abstract expressionism” to describe their artistic style.
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