Norman Lewis was born in New York City where he remained for his career. In the 1930s, he studied art at Columbia University while concurrently studying with sculptor Augusta Savage (1892–1962). Initially, Lewis created paintings in the Social Realist style but, in the 1940s, he shifted to the gestural abstract works that put him in close dialogue with other New York painters downtown, and he was a central figure in the artistic circles of what would become known as Abstract Expressionism. Lewis was a founding member of Spiral, a collective of black artists, debating the ways that artists could establish their identity and role in the demand for civil rights; he was also an important mentor and model for Jack Whitten and other younger black artists in New York. Most recently, in 2015–2016, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts presented the retrospective exhibition Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis.
“Painting, like music, had something inherent in itself which I had to discover and which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality, that which is inherent in painting, in those four sides; . . . it has to do with feeling, and the person, the individual, . . . becoming a thinking human being.”