Untitled
- On View
- Visual Arts Gallery
- Museum Maps
- Objects in this Location
- Exhibition
- Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience.
- Created by
- Lewis, Spencer
- Date
- 2021
- Medium
- Oil, acrylic and enamel on jute
- Dimensions
- H x W x D: 96 3/4 × 68 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (245.7 × 173.4 × 7 cm)
- Caption
- Spencer Lewis is an artist best known for his abstract and colorful paintings executed on cardboard or jute (a plant fiber used to make burlap). His work explores the process of gestural painting expressed through heavily worked pigmented strokes and tactile canvases. Although his work is largely abstract, Lewis imbues the brown foundations of his canvases with a multiplicity of meanings. “I loved both the cardboard, and now the jute, for being brown,” he says. “Both surfaces Brown like me. I think of the brown paper bag test, and just one drop of blood, and 3/5ths of a person. … I don’t need to define brown, but a friend mentioned that the works made him think of ‘passing.’ … It was such a brilliant insight, and for now I’ll leave it at that.”
- Description
- An abstract painting of oil and acrylic on jute. Layers of gestural strokes in shades of red, blue, orange, purple, lavender, green and white stand out in a colorful burst against the field of brown jute. The painting is signed and dated by the artist on the back stretcher.
- Classification
- Visual Arts
- Type
- paintings
- Topic
- Abstraction
- Art
- Credit Line
- Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
- Object number
- 2022.15
- Restrictions & Rights
- © Spencer Lewis
- Permission required for use. Proper usage is the responsibility of the user.