- - Sarah Lewis Sees the Role Art Has to Play in Justice

Olivia B. WaxmanJanuary 27, 2026 at 8:02 AM

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Credit - Joyanne Panton

Sarah Lewis is on a mission to make sure Black artists get their due. As a curator, an art and cultural historian, and an academic, Lewis is guided by a big question: “What is the role of art and culture for determining who counts, and who belongs, in society?”

While at Harvard, where she works out of Jamaica Kincaid’s former office, Lewis founded the Vision & Justice initiative, which studies Black artists so that their work can be taught to future generations. While museums have exhibited more artists of color in recent years, Lewis argues that visibility can’t be the final objective. “Being seen doesn't land you ultimately in the history books, necessarily,” she says. “What does is being included, rigorously considered, and part of a canon.”

During a video call from her Boston-area home—with Ellis Island ship manifests for her great-grandparents and great-aunt framed behind her—Lewis, 46, talks about how her family inspired her to pursue a career in art criticism. Her grandfather Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, a jazz musician who performed with Duke Ellington and a painter who focused on painting a diverse cast of Americans, was once expelled from a public school in New York City because he kept asking his teachers why Black Americans were not represented in the textbooks.

“He was told that African Americans were not worthy of inclusion, and he just did not accept that as an answer,” Lewis says. She sees her work as a continuation of the debate her grandfather sparked in his youth.

Her Vision & Justice course is one of the most popular classes at Harvard. In 2027, Random House is expected to publish her book on the role of culture in the fight for justice since the founding of the United States. The Vision & Justice initiative also produces a book series with Aperture, the latest volumes of which analyze the work of Coreen Simpson and Eslanda Robeson (Paul Robeson’s wife). Lewis herself is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024) and The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and The Search for Mastery (2015). She organizes summits to bring the themes of her work into the real world, with speakers like Audra McDonald, Ava DuVernay, John Legend, and Chelsea Clinton, all of whom participated in the second Vision & Justice Convening in fall 2025, co-hosted by Sherrilyn Ifill.

Lewis’s scholarship has been noticed outside of academia, too. The late congressman John Lewis (no relation) called up Lewis in 2019 and invited her to speak onstage with him during the Selma to Montgomery pilgrimage he took with his congressional colleagues. Lewis knew already that the work she was doing was important, but the famed civil rights activist’s interest was a career highlight, extra validation that reinforced the value of her studies. “The affirmation of that invitation gave me the steam and the fuel to continue,” Lewis says.

It’s urgent work at a time when artists face censorship and funding cuts under President Trump’s administration. But Lewis remains optimistic. “It's during a crisis that we determine and see what matters,” she says. “As Toni Morrison reminds us, it's when artists get to work. It's when we see who's going to lead the way.”

Lewis emphasizes that museums have an important role to play in terms of exposing visitors to diverse artists: “You can't end racial discrimination without the work of culture that takes place in museums.” The way a viewer approaches a piece of art is a model for empathy. “One of the gifts of the arts is to stop time,” she says. “You have stopped your day, your patterns, to ask yourself, why? What is it about this composition, this medium, this choice that the artist has made that allows someone to have their perception altered? You are able to really see the world anew.”

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”