Samella Lewis Print Club

Swamp Diva (2005) draws on Lewis’s upbringing in New Orleans and her family’s deep roots in Louisiana’s bayou country. She once said that the meaningful symbols of her Louisiana childhood could provide material for paintings for the rest of her life. Here, a commanding face emerges through saturated red, yellow, green, and deep blue, with visible brushstrokes keeping the surface alive. The title joins the figure’s self-possession to the swamp and bayou landscape that shaped Lewis’s earliest memories.

The 2007 hand-embellished impression shows a boy seated on a bench, absorbed in an open book. Lewis’s lifelong work as an art educator gives the scene context: study becomes a form of possibility. Against the history of restrictions and violence surrounding Black literacy, this ordinary act of reading carries particular weight.

The work began as a 1958 oil painting on wood panel. Nearly four decades later, Lewis revisited it in a color screenprint titled Landscape. Long horizontal bands of red, orange, green, and blue turn the upstate New York view into a composition shaped by color and rhythm.

Lewis’s 1968 linocut portrays seven migrants seated closely together, with sharply cut marks defining their faces, clothing, and individual postures. Lewis later recalled seeing the subjects—bean pickers—in the back of a bus. Their compressed arrangement gives the group a shared weight while preserving each person’s distinct presence; among them, a woman with crossed arms meets the viewer directly.

Massai (2005) is a close-up, highly abstracted portrait of a Maasai warrior. Broad red, yellow, blue, and green strokes reduce the face to color and structure while keeping its gaze and expression vivid. The tight crop holds the viewer at close range, face to face with the subject.

In Confrontation (1969), black-and-white forms press against and move through one another. LACMA connects the work’s stark contrast with the struggle for civil rights. The composition can also be read as one continuous, fluid gesture, turning confrontation into an exchange of pressure, resistance, and movement.

The Hammer Museum describes Family (1967) as an abstract linocut of three upright, leaf-like forms. In black and white, carved contours and open space make their closeness the structure of the image: distinct forms stand together, suggesting kinship through proximity.

In Waterfront (2016), a broad tree anchors the foreground as sailboats drift across a deep band of blue water toward a distant shore. The composition balances rootedness and motion: the weight of the tree holds the eye while the open water carries it outward. Lewis turns an ordinary shoreline into a place of stillness, distance, and possibility.

Lewis drew on childhood memories of Ring Around the Rosie for Children’s Game (1968/1982), where linked hands turn the circle into a rhythm of movement. LACMA describes its mood as joy and hope in togetherness. The game depends on each child staying connected to the group—a memory of play and community.

In Home Sweet Home (1968), a seated figure reads by candlelight. The small flame creates an intimate space around the reader, turning the act of reading into one of quiet comfort and absorption. The title reinforces that sense of refuge: home as a place where the figure can withdraw into the private world of a book.

Field (1968) sets a solitary figure beneath an enormous sun, one arm raised with a clenched fist. A Hammer Museum teaching guide connects the image with histories of enslaved and migrant labor, and the raised fist with Black Power-era solidarity. The stark linocut makes the gesture carry the composition’s political force.

I See You (2005) is a linocut portrait of an anonymous, androgynous face. Scripps College describes its chiseled, linear quality; dense carved marks and stark contrast make the eyes especially insistent. Looking becomes an encounter among sitter, artist, and viewer, with the figure seeming to return the viewer’s gaze.