Norman Lewis was an African-American artist known for his incisive depictions of contemporary society and poetic abstractions. “I wanted to be above criticism, so that my work didn't have to be discussed in terms of the fact that I'm black,” he once said. Born on July 23, 1909 in New York, NY, Lewis began his career as a Social Realist painter, focusing on the inequities caused by poverty and racism, as seen in his work Girl with Yellow Hat (1936). In the mid-1940s, his focus shifted towards abstraction and gestural mark-making, drawing inspiration from the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Tobey. He emerged as the sole black artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists alongside Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. Though his paintings changed Lewis remained committed to social concerns throughout his career, forming the Spiral Group with Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff, the group’s primary mission was assisting the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. The artist died on August 27, 1979 in New York, NY. Today, Lewis’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.