Tales from The b.a.SKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover
By D. Amari Jackson
This week, we reach into the b.a.SKET and pull out a poetic tribute to a newly crowned ancestor…
Artist, educator, scholar, curator, writer, administrator, editor, filmmaker, and collector, Dr. Samella Lewis, was with us for many a cycle and a season. Her recent transition at age 99 is simultaneously a cause for sadness, reflection, and the celebration of an icon who left our art world far richer than it was when she first arrived.
Dr. Lewis’s many accomplishments are the stuff of legend. And fortunately, for us, the legend is true. Her role in the development and evolution of the field of African American Art is undeniable. She founded the International Review of African American Art, for many years the premiere publication in the field. She cofounded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, acting as its chief curator from 1976 through 1986. She founded The Gallery at Scripps College in Claremont, California where she was a professor for 15 years. She wrote numerous books and publications about Black art and artists to promote and advance the field of African American Art. And as BAIA contributor, Shantay Robinson, penned in in her stellar account, “Dr. Samella Lewis: The Godmother of African American Art,” Lewis accomplished “all of this while being a wife and mother.”
“Mother and Child” by Dr. Samella Lewis
24 x 18 inches, lithograph on paper, limited edition #03/40, (2007) –unframed
Today, we pull from the basket to present the poignant lithograph, Mother and Child, by Dr. Samella Lewis. It is accompanied by a poem I first published in 2008 in the funeral program for Clarice Brooks Jackson, the day we both buried my mother and celebrated my birth.
It is called More than Winter…
Nature informs us
if we listen
listen closely
to the setting sun
to the changing season
then we’ll hear them
those who have gone before us
in the song of the sparrow
the whisper of the wind
sustaining us, guiding us
warming our days with their presence
their eternal presence
as past, present and future
collapse into snapshots
precious slices of sentiment
parading images
of life, love and loss
And though seasons change
and winter will most certainly come
carrying the sting of cold
upon our reluctant faces
collecting its cyclical fee
for months of warmth preceding
we must not forget
the Flower of Life
the blossom of Spring
with her nurturing rays of sun
like a Mother’s Love
warming our path
sheltering us from the cold
allaying our fear
and ever reminding us
that we are not less than
because we are now without her
but we are more than
because we were with her.
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Amari Jackson is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.
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