And Still She Rises
Catching Up with Sarah Lewis
As a visual arts professional, she has a broad range of interests from to 19th century history to the tip of the contemporary edge. She’s also has multiple roles— curator, professor, art foundation advisor, art and education policy wonk, and critic (whose essays have been published in The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America and in catalogues for the 2007 Venice Biennial, the Guggenheim Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Smithsonian Institution; and The Studio Museum in Harlem).
From her academic foundation in the visual arts and humanities, her inquiry radiates to cover topics in many other areas of life. So what to call Sarah Lewis? A string like this begins to express it: curator, historian, public intellectual and author — and not ”author” meaning a historian or curator who writes, but a writer to the bone, some one devoted to the art and craft of writing.
In interviewing Sarah Lewis for a 2010 IRAAA (v. 23, n.2) article, contributing writer Andrea Douglas considered all of Lewis’s activities and wondered when she slept. Lewis admitted sleep was hard to come by. One of her activities at the time was co-curating The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial. The Dissolve (i.e., the film production term for fading one scene into the next) displayed 26 works that exemplify the role of media technologies in the creation and presentation of modern and contemporary art. Architect David Adjaye designed the 15,000-square exhibition space. Also in 2010 Lewis was profiled in Vogue’s People are Talking column and she made O magazine’s “Power List” of 20 women achievers.
When she was not in the spotlight, Lewis was deep in library stacks or digging through archives or hunkered down at a desk at work on her dissertation. Lewis’ thesis on “Circassian Beauties” examined an odd mix — white women of the mid to late 19th century who were renowned for both purity of their whiteness and the kinkiness of their hair. And another idea for a writing project was gestating —a book on how failure can be a prelude to success. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2014.
Her art activities include serving as art advisor for the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. She urged the board of the new sports and concert venue to commission a mural by José Parlá. She envisioned how the Brooklyn-based, Cuban American, hip hop insider, graffiti writing, abstract expressionist artist could exemplify the spirit of the borough. And that he did in Brooklyn Diary, the massive (70’ x 10’) mural at the Center’s entrance— a swirling mass of lines and tagged words and phrases conveying the bristling energies of that urban scene.
In March 2014, Lewis’ book, The Rise The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, was published. Lewis’ appearances at Sundance with Robert Redford, on the Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and a TED talk (now considered one of the year’s best talks) helped propel The Rise’s swift rise. By mid-April 2014, sales for the book (#18 on the New York Times bestsellers list) had outpaced those for Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s much-discussed book, Lean In (at # 19). Lewis knows how work her social network and that network includes many celebrated and influential people. Being as gracious and considerate as she is savvy and energetic has been a key element in her own rise to success. She demonstrates how old school manners can trump sharp elbows and bravado to facilitate a rise to success.
One of the most important lessons Lewis learned from working on The Rise is the power of surrender. Surrender “is not giving up but giving over,” she explained in a conversation with performance artist Anna Deveare Smith at the New York Public Library. “There is something much larger than yourself and circumstance. And by releasing that resistance you find the resources you need to move forward.”
Now, as a fellow at Harvard’s DuBois Research Institute, Lewis is reworking her doctoral thesis into a second book, Black Sea, Black Atlantic: Frederick Douglass, the Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation in the Wake of the Civil War.
Describing the book on the Institute’s Fellows’ page, Lewis says:
(it) argues that an understudied literature of pictures by leading photographers Mathew Brady and Charles Eisenmann of widely popular nineteenth century performers, the Circassian Beauties—the afro-coiffed figures hailing from Circassia (in Russia's Black Sea area), the land of purported white racial purity—makes clear that we are in need of a more capacious transatlantic discourse that extends the Black Atlantic to the often disconnected cultural history of the Black Sea….“What does it mean that an aesthetic that we commonly associate with black racial authenticity once represented white racial purity?
Looking at purported “Circassian” beauties during an on-line search, one can see how P.T. Barnum and other showmen latched onto the concept and handily exploited it by circumventing Circassia and exhibiting frizzy-haired American women as the famed beautifies. At least one African American woman called “Zumigo” found an outlet through the fad for her own Africoid beauty. Lewis is doing extensive research and analysis to dissect this odd and fascinating development in our collective history and to frame it within contexts such as Frederick Douglas’ concept of “thought pictures.”
The book will be published in 2016 by the Harvard University Press.
Related IRAAA+ article:
Race, Love and Labor exhibition curated by Sarah Lewis
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