Samella Sanders Lewis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Her passion for art started from a young age, inspired by various genres, from comic books and Romance novels to depictions of police brutality against African Americans. In 1941, at 18, she began to study history at Dillard University, taking only one art class. Encouraged by her professor and later mentor, the artist Elizabeth Catlett, she changed her major to art and later transferred to Hampton Institute in Virginia, earning a master’s degree in 1947. In those years, she began collecting art, mainly by artists associated with Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) and the Harlem Renaissance. She took a teaching position at Morgan State University while furthering her education in art history and cultural anthropology at Ohio State University. In 1951, at 28, Lewis completed her doctorate and became the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in fine art and art history. In 1953, Lewis got appointed the chair of the fine arts department at Florida A&M University, serving the position for five years. That year, she organized the first professional conference for African American artists. As a member of the NAACP and a civil rights activist, Lewis encountered harassment from the KKK, which led her to leave Florida in 1958. She took a teaching post at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, where she developed an interest in Asian art, culture, and languages. Over time, she returned to focus on African American Art as an artist and a scholar. She became known for her figurative works, which included linocuts, lithographs, and serigraphs, mainly pictorial manifestations of black liberation, as seen in her work Field. In 1966, Lewis began teaching at California State University at Long Beach and established herself as a leading figure in the Los Angeles art scene. She created the short documentary series “The Black Artists” and worked as a coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she fought for hiring more Black workers and founded the Concerned Citizens for Black Art group, which defined guidelines for the museum to be more inclusive. In 1969, she coedited the two volumes of Black Artists on Art, and to publish the book, she cofounded Contemporary Crafts Gallery – the first African American–owned art book publication. The following year, she was appointed professor of art history and humanities at Scripps College, becoming the first African American faculty member to receive tenure. In 1975, at 52, Lewis cofounded the journal Black Art: An International Quarterly, later renamed International Review of African American Art. The following year, she established the Museum of African American Art, serving as its senior curator until 1986. Lewis organized exhibitions and developed educational programs, claiming that museums are responsible for exploring the roots and origins of African American art. She continued to establish three more African American art museums and galleries in LA. Throughout her life, Lewis earned four degrees, published seven books, created five films, and displayed her artworks in nine solo and group exhibitions. She died of renal failure at the age of 99. Read more...

Laura Mary Bragg was born in Northbridge, Massachusetts. At the age of 6, she contracted scarlet fever that caused her an incurable hearing loss, for which she compensated by reading lips and having an exceptional memory. She was home-schooled by private tutors until high school and afterward attended Simmons College, earning a degree in library science. At 25, she started to work as a librarian, first in Maine and then at one of the libraries in New York City. In 1909, at the age of 28, Bragg began her career at the Charleston Museum in South Carolina. She started as a librarian and soon got promoted to curate books and public instruction. In this position, she developed the first educational program of the museum, which was the first in a southern museum to welcome all visitors, regardless of their race. Bragg saw herself as a social missionary, believing that a museum is not only a visitors’ attraction but a teaching tool that should be available to everyone, including those who are unable to visit it. To execute her ideas, she developed traveling school exhibits that became known as “Bragg Boxes” – wooden boxes opened into a display set of local natural history or cultural history. The boxes were distributed to all the schools in the region, white and black, urban and rural. The Bragg Boxes had an immediate success and were incorporated in other museums as well. In 1921, 40 years old Bragg was named the director of the Charleston Museum – the first woman in the US to run a publicly funded art museum. Under her leadership, the museum had weekly opening hours for black visitors. She expanded the museum’s field by creating connections with the American Alliance of Museums, where she was later appointed as a board member. In 1931, Bragg added public reading rooms to the museum and established the first free library in Charleston, in which she served as a trustee and librarian. Bragg received national acclaim for her work at the Charleston Museum, and in 1930 she was asked to become the director of the Berkshire Museum. At the time, the museum had exhibited a small family collection, and Bragg developed it into an educational institute. She expanded the exhibitions, turned its yard into a sculpture gallery, and hosted performing artists. Within a year, the museum had doubled the number of visitors. After nine years, she retired from directing the museum and returned to Charleston to work as an educator at the museum’s library. Bragg’s interest in art and education expanded outside her work in the museums. In 1920, she was a part of the Charleston Renaissance, alongside artists such as Alice Ravenel Huger, DuBose Heyward, and Josephine Pinckney, and co-founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Southern Museum Conference, and the Southern States Art League. Bragg died at the age of 97 in Charleston. Learn more about Bragg and other pioneer women of Charleston in one of these guided tours: Charleston’s Strong Women of the South History Tour Historic Women of Charleston Guided Walking Tour Amazing Ladies of Charleston Walking Tour Read more...

Grace Louise McCann Morley was born in Berkeley and grew up in St. Helena. She received her MA in French from the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks to a scholarship, she lived three years in Paris – working on her PhD from the Sorbonne. It is in France where she earned a deeper understanding of the arts. When she returned, she found a job teaching French at Goucher College in Baltimore. Her career took a shift thanks to a summer course at Harvard, which was intended to introduce museum studies to teachers. Her first curatorial position was at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. From there she moved back to California and took on the role of director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (which is currently called San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In her role she was considered very progressive in engaging her community: she offered educational activities, kept the museum open until ten in the evening, presented up to 100 exhibitions a year, supporting local artists and artists of color. Morley gave unprecedented attention to women in the program, with dozens of solo shows to female artists such as Ruth Armer, Julia Codesido, Aline Liebman, Henrietta Shore, and Susi Singer. She then continued to serve as the first head of the Museum Division of UNESCO, helped to organize the International Council of Museums and founded the publication “Museum.” When she was sixty years old, she was offered to become the director of the National Museum of New Delhi. After six years in her role, she stayed in India until her death in 1985. Read more...