SARAH LEWIS is among the most insightful and eloquent speakers on race in America, one of only two professors ever hired at Harvard to focus on African-American art. In spellbinding talks, she probes questions so fundamental to our cultural consciousness that to consider them at all is to be profoundly re-oriented, instantly understanding culture not as a benign reflection of society, but rather something created; something we are in control of—and images, she argues, are our most powerful tool.
“Every two minutes we create as many images as were created in the entire 19th century,” Lewis says, and “we’re reading images as much as we’re seeing them … there is a language and a syntax and a grammar to them.” And though all of us, digital natives especially, are voracious readers, how literate are we? Sociologists tell us that less and less we’re engaging with those who are different from us, curating our own visual content which affirms our existing biases and beliefs. And this, says Lewis, distorts our notions of “who belongs, who counts, and what humanity looks like.” Lewis’ talks urgently address the world we are living in right now, gathering in various threads—art history, technical innovation, race, photography, the story of America, and her own deeply personal narrative—to elucidate the power of art to ignite transformative social change. And it’s this combination of urgency, hope, and clear, compelling analysis which keep Lewis’ lecture halls packed; the reason her award-winning “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture magazine (now in its fourth printing) and forthcoming book (Random House) have garnered unprecedented press coverage and changed the national conversation on race. “She’s found the visual analog for Black Lives Matter,” celebrated professor and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells The Boston Globe. “No one has done that before.”
In her recent article for Art Journal, Lewis focused on the groundwork of contemporary arts in the context of Stand Your Ground Laws. First established in 2005, and now applicable in over 33 states, these laws define a person’s right to self-defense—to claim the ground on which they stand to defend themselves from “reasonable threat.” Unfortunately, these laws disproportionately affect black and brown lives. Lewis’ article explores artworks that ask the question: What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? For her work, she was awarded the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA) for the best piece in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood. Described as “beautifully written, original, and penetrating,” the article bridges the gap between philosophy and art criticism, and will be the subject of her upcoming book. Lewis is also the bestselling author of The Rise, a story-driven investigation into the biography of an idea—a big idea—that no current term yet captures. It’s about creative human endeavor, and how innovation, mastery, and new concepts are found in unlikely places. Kirkus Reviews writes, “Creativity, like genius, is inexplicable, but Lewis’ synthesis of history, biography, and psychological research offers a thoughtful response to the question of how new ideas happen.” The Rise has been translated into six languages to date.
Lewis has spoken to top-tier organizations from Prada to ABC to United Way. Her mainstage TED talk received over 2.8 million views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. Recently, Lewis was prominently featured in HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light, a “rich and absorbing” documentary exploring two centuries of art by African-Americans, and the path they forged for contemporary Black artists. Lewis’ scholarship has also been profiled by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She was on Oprah’s “Power List,” served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, and in 2019, she was the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The award honors Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”
An associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Lewis’ research focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States. Her forthcoming publications include, among others, Vision and Justice (Random House), and an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021) which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, who described it as “thoughtful, thorough, and timely.”