“The Work Is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings and Paintings by Samella Lewis”
Eileen Harris Norton’s first purchase, a 1976 linocut by Ruth Waddy, was bought from the artist at the Museum of African American Art, an institution founded by Samella Lewis (1923-2022), the artist, scholar and arts advocate. A few years earlier, Waddy and Lewis had collaborated on the groundbreaking book “Black Artists on Art” (1969). This exhibition of Lewis’s artworks ranges from a 1942 charcoal drawing to late paintings, but its core may be the linocuts that Lewis made in the 1960s and ’70s, some depicting migrant laborers and others, such as “Black Sun,” that are strikingly abstract.