James E. Lewis
He is best known for his role as the leading force for the creation of the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, an institution of the HBCU Morgan State University.
Shortly after his birth, his father moved to Baltimore for increased job opportunities; James E. was subsequently raised by his mother until the family was reunited in 1925.
They lived for a short time with distant relatives until moving to a four-bedroom house[6] on 1024 North Durham Street[3] in East Baltimore, a predominantly African-American lower-class neighborhood close to Johns Hopkins Hospital.
He was able to study both European classics and negro spirituals, which was one of his earliest introductions to arts specific to American black culture.
[6] At age sixteen, Lewis had won a citywide poster design contest, and later had the work displayed at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
[9] He was personally very close with the school faculty, often going over to Davis' house to listen to jazz music or visiting Dr. Winslow and his children.
[6] Luckily, a compromise was made with the school to allow an advanced student, American artist Charles Cross, to tutor him in private sessions.
As a result, James E. Lewis opted to work at the Baltimore Calvert distillery during the summer following graduation,[6] beginning on the 30th of June of that year.
He was stationed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, traveling there with his fellow Marines in a segregated train car.
Shortly after the services, he returned to camp, something which he regretted in hindsight after finding out he could have been discharged, as he was his mother's sole source of financial support.
Given the prevalence of racial discrimination in the United States military and the skill of the battalion, Lewis claimed that they were shipped out to Easter Island to keep them away from the action and preserve the image of the white Marines.
[2] During this time, he met and married his wife,[6] Jacqueline Lucille Adams and Saint Cyprian's Episcopal Church in the Elmwood neighborhood of Philadelphia on June 8, 1946.
Three days before his planned arrival in Jackson, Mississippi, he received a call from Martin David Jenkins with another offer to teach at Morgan State.
Lewis changed his mind and took the Morgan position, settling back in Baltimore with his wife and son, James.
Samella Lewis was on leave at the start of his position, and she left shortly after his promotion to chairman at the end of the year.
[2] It was during his time at Yale that he was working directly under the great Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, who "shook up" what Lewis previously knew about art.
[9] Lewis was working on curating an exhibition at Morgan's art galleries at the time, one of the most influential shows of his career, entitled "The Calculated Image".
He conducted his study on the aforementioned visual artists with the additions of Herbert Gentry, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Many artists donated works to the museum to celebrate its renaming, including Gordon Parks, Sam Gilliam, Grace Hartigan, Joyce J. Scott, Jack White, and Joan Erbe.
[6] These finds were significant in that they identified a cultural connection between ancient Ifẹ and Benin societies, visible through the similarities to both of their works.
[8] His primary means of gaining acceptance for his works were to create sculptures in a Western naturalistic or abstract expressionist style.
[2] He once said, "Had I gone in to meetings with their committee looking exotic in a dashiki and all the trappings worn by the young black activists who have knowledge of African aesthetic, my ideas would have been promptly rejected.
[21] Sometime prior to fall 1968, an anonymous donor put out a nationwide search for an artist willing to create a statue dedicated to African-Americans who had been involved in military conflict.
A law firm, on behalf of the donor, sent a letter to Lewis to gauge his interest in the project, asking him to submit a sketch and a cost estimate.
His original sketch for the work was revealed in The Baltimore Sun on October 4, 1968, which displayed a wreath and a list of wars that black soldiers had been a part of.
In June 1968, the Baltimore Board of Recreation and Parks approved the location of the statue to be placed at Battle Monument Square.
Harry D. Kaufman, a member of the Park Board,[23] criticized the fact that the statue was going to be of an unidentified black male, arguing that it was a tribute to a race as opposed to an individual.
[24] Additional arguments were also raised by the General Society of the War of 1812, the Constellation Committee, and the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House.
[25] Some concerns were raised about the location of the statue, which was a plaza dedicated to the fallen soldiers of Fort McHenry, which some believed would change the scope and meaning of the site.
