Spotlight: Shannon T. Lewis

NOVEMBER 29, 2023-JANUARY 20, 2024

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Shannon T. Lewis’s Storing Up Sensation, 2023, with a text by author and writer Jasmin Hernandez.

Sitting in Splendor
By Jasmin Hernandez

During a Videofashion! interview at New York Fashion Week in 1998, the late and legendary Vogue Editor-at-Large André Leon Talley, gave his take on Manhattan’s society ladies and ‘it’ girls, and their need for endless lavish wardrobes: “They have dinner parties to go to, social functions, opening nights, ballet, opera, they have a lot to do…” The witty quote has become a viral TikTok sound enthusiastically used by fashion lovers. The Black women figures in Shannon T. Lewis’s oil paintings also have a lot of extravagant things to do. They’re dressed in their sartorial finest, always well moisturized, and occupy sumptuous domestic spaces. They have pretty manicures (Ones To Watch, 2018), sit in their expensive lingerie wearing gorgeous jewels (Fixture of Fantasy, 2019), and stare intently at the viewer (Accessible To Encounter, 2020). They're always in motion, breezing in and out, coming and going, through doors and windows. Sometimes, it’s just their floating limbs. It’s what Lewis describes as, “moving from a place to see a place.”

Lewis, an Afro-Trinidadian artist born and raised in Toronto, and based in Berlin, constructs lush surreal worlds where Black women come to play, luxuriate, or just be pensive. In these worlds, her Black femme figures are really passing through portals that question their race, gender, socio-economic class, and immigration status. “My work is about mobility, whether it’s social, emotional, or also just citizenship, and the performance involved in traveling through different spaces,” she reveals. In her canvases, often diptychs and triptychs, she conjures disembodied Black femme figures in the fantastical and decked out in high fashion. Heads and hands, or just legs, draped in opulent garments and accessories. These collage elements originate from her love for fashion magazines; she keeps a large collection of them stacked and organized in her Berlin studio. 

Growing up with Vogue and Essence, she’d cut out images, and study the ways Black women are presented in visual culture. By scrapbooking, Lewis created her own personal archives. She calls it a “choice”, by “weaving your own narrative” based on what’s offered. Especially, when what’s offered has been historically problematic and exclusionary, primarily with top (and very white) fashion publications from the 1960s through the last decade. Black women, as both supermodels and celebrities, rarely appeared on mainstream magazine covers, and, when they did, white creative teams styled and photographed them through a racist and fetishistic lens. 

Lewis also likes, what she calls, “constructed and artificial” luxury homes and rooms found in interior design magazines. Luxe spaces add another dimension to her surrealist paintings, playing into the class and social mobility of her figures. This rings very true and loud and the social factors for Black women can vary. The first-generation struggle of being born to Black immigrant parents, or being a first-gen college graduate, or the rooms of power you aspire to enter one day, or the affluent dream home you may want to own. Yet, very often, when Black women enter these rooms, we have to at times shrink ourselves or code-switch, to navigate social spaces not designed for us. “Places, spaces, and totems, and it’s like we’ve made it in a way,” Lewis shares. 

Lewis defines her alluring paintings as “haptic” and an “exercise in softness.” Her piece in The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight series, Storing Up Sensation, 2023, is a study in softness, memories, connectedness, and Black femininity. Inspired by a Klimt painting, where his subject’s eyes radiate, Lewis’s subject in Storing Up Sensation, an old friend she met a decade ago during her London days, says their eyes “look like they’re dancing no matter what.” Reconnecting with her sitter, stirred up joy and laughter between them that translated into the work too. The oil on linen diptych bursts with an indulgent silkiness, honing in on Lewis’s focus: fabric, clothing, and the softness of material. The subject holds a smartphone dressed in a hyper-feminine blush pink outfit: a fuzzy sweater, tulle skirt, and stiletto sandals. And the sitter’s thick black curls brought back pandemic memories for Lewis, when she relearned how to do her natural hair and rediscovered her natural hair texture. For the artist, it activated, “All these… histories… history with your hair, taming your hair…” Lewis continues, “The softness of the hair, the touch, the re-memory of the touch.” There’s a mix of sensations to sit with here. Black women’s hair politics, which have always been contentious, and yet the superpowers that have always resided within our crown.

The Afro-Trinidadian women in Lewis’s family are the nucleus of her practice. Notably her grandmother, “a lot of my work is mining stories from her,” the artist says. Lewis acknowledges the multi-generational trauma in her family but there’s also “multi-generational love, desire, and care.” Care looks like a spa day spent with her grandmother. Luxurious things her grandmother was unable to do for herself, but pleasures they can now share together. Lewis understands her freedom as an artist, because in the Caribbean, “it’s mostly a story of women not living the lives they wanted to, but lives that they kind of had to.” Very often in Lewis’s work, Black women hold hands, are conjoined somehow, and it’s extended across diptychs and triptychs for emphasis. “Figures from certain generations are reaching through and touching others,” she explains.

For Lewis, “past and present connect”, which is deeply informed by the fragmentation caused by British colonization. Coming from a “double-colonized place”, being born to Afro-Trinidadian immigrant parents in Toronto, moving to London, for her MFA at Goldsmiths, and now living in Berlin (“this weird triangulation through Europe”), Lewis didn’t realize her “lens is so British colonial.” She notes, “This is the history of the Caribbean, this intense fragmentation,” and she’s observed the “cuts” and “splits” as a part of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in both Canada and the United Kingdom. “Somehow we built a culture on top of this, and it was never meant to be, in a way…” In the fragmentation and collage elements in Lewis’s Afro-Surrealist oil paintings, all the cuts and splits matter.

About:

Shannon T. Lewis (b. 1981, Toronto, Canada) is an artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Lewis earned a BA from Ontario College of Art & Design University, Toronto, Canada, in 2006, and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom, in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include The Softness of Much Handled Things, Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago, IL (2022); Get Me Bodied: Navigation Acts, Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago (2019); and Shape Shifters and Other Flaws, Galerie Andreas Schmidt, Berlin, Germany (2018). Her work has been included numerous group exhibitions, including Un Abrazo, Mariane Ibrahim, Mexico City, Mexico (2023); Not Only Through Seas, But Soil, Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, Canada (2022); Beyond the Looking Glass, UTA Artist Space, Beverly Hills, CA (2021); the Procreate Art Prize Exhibition, Cromwell Place, London, United Kingdom (2020); among others. Lewis’s work is included in the Dean Collection, Macedon, NY.

Jasmin Hernandez (she/her) is the Black Latina founder & Editor-in-Chief of her art baby Gallery Gurls, an award-winning digital space celebrating Black & POC changemakers in contemporary art since 2012. Gallery Gurls has been featured in Artnet and Vogue, and partnered with Artsy, Dior, OUTFRONT Media, Vanity Fair, etc. Hernandez’s writing has appeared in Bustle, CNN Style, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Latina, PopSugar, and Refinery29, among others. Her debut book, We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World, was released by Abrams (2021). Hernandez’s writing has been awarded by The Awesome Foundation (2018), Critical Minded (2020), and she is a Creatives Rebuild New York inaugural grant recipient (2022-24). She is a proud Dominican Yorker, based in Harlem, NY.