Philanthropist and former Gibbes Museum board member Esther Ferguson wanted to bring dynamic cultural leaders to Charleston when she created in 2012 the annual Distinguished Lecture Series.
Becca Hiester, curator of education at the Gibbes, said the series is “about bringing world-renowned authority on art and art history to Charleston.”
Past speakers include artists Jeff Koons, Maya Lin and Fred Wilson; critics, like last year’s speaker Jerry Saltz; as well as collectors, including Martin Marguiles and Pablo Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Picasso.
This year’s speaker Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the first art historian in the series — and she’s a groundbreaking one at that. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice and democracy.
She’s the founder and leader of an initiative called Vision & Justice, which generates original research presented through institutional collaborations, leadership convenings and public programs to reveal the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity in America.
Lewis is the John L. Loeb associate professor of the humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Lewis held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Tate Modern in London. She also served as a critic at Yale University School of Art.
In her lecture at 6 p.m. Nov. 1 at the Sottile Theatre, Lewis will present her findings about how visual culture can create justice — especially as it relates to the current special exhibition at the Gibbes, The Bitter Years: Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection.
Culture creates justice
Lewis’ interest in art history started as an interest in artmaking. Her grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, planted the seeds of the question which is at the core of Lewis’ work: What is the role of art and culture in social justice?
Her grandfather had been expelled from a Brooklyn public high school in 1926 for asking why Black people were not in his history textbook.
“His teacher told him African Americans had done nothing worthy of being included,” Lewis said, “and my grandfather was expelled from high school for his so-called impertinence. He never got his high school degree — but he went on to be a painter.”
And he taught his granddaughter, Lewis, to make art, showing her how drawing and painting were tools through which to create new possibilities. “As a painter, my grandfather would create the very images he should’ve been able to find in those textbooks,” she said.
When 18-year-old Lewis went to Harvard to study art history, she found that the discipline mostly taught art as reflecting the issues of society in a given time. But what she understood from her grandfather’s lessons, she said, was that “art and culture could create the just society in which we hope to live.”
Lewis later curated at the MoMA, studied at Yale and joined the faculty at Harvard.
“I taught myself to become the professor I wanted to have as a student,” she said. She pioneered and continues to teach the course called Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which is now a part of Harvard’s core curriculum.
Image making in the 21st century
In the age of the iPhone, as Lewis put it in her 2017 TED Talk, we can create as many images in two minutes as were made in the entire 19th century. That’s one reason visual literacy and representation are especially important today.
“We are in a crisis of regard in society. We live in increasingly siloed communities,” Lewis said. “The arts can create these bridges to show us what we don’t know about each other and about ourselves, and show us our common humanity.
“In this period, we’ve relied increasingly on the image to narrate who we are in America. And that’s really the most difficult question we have that we’re still facing: How do we tell the story of who we are? And if we think we can do it without culture, we’re mistaken. If you think we can do it with a series of laws alone, you’re mistaken.”
On how she’d like to see art institutions evolve to better represent art’s relationship with social justice, Lewis said there is a reckoning underway.
“Now is the time to continue conversations of representation in museums, in exhibition choices and topics, but also on the staffing of the boards — the composition of the staff. And not just hiring, but retention.”
We can more thoughtfully engage with visual culture and its relationship with justice on an individual level, too, Lewis said.
“One way is to engage with the museum as a laboratory to ensure that you’re coming to the experience open to learning and to having your thoughts transformed through the experience.”
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