Norman Lewis was born in Harlem and received his artistic education in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. “The younger painters like Jake [Lawrence], Romy [Bearden], myself, we did a lot of listening,” he later explained [as quoted by Ann Eden Gibson, Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946 -1977 (1998), p. 14]. The listening he did – to the painters Charles Alston and Aaron Douglas, the sculptors Henry Bannarn and Augusta Savage—would contribute to Lewis’s art and activism in the next decades. His work for the WPA, alongside Adolph Gottlieb and Jackson Pollock, added to his development as an important voice of abstract expressionism at midcentury. His early work often engaged social realism, but by the mid-1940s, he moved decisively away from this mode. Lewis wrote extensively and often of the “limitations which come under the names, ‘African Idiom,’ ‘Negro Idiom,’ or ‘Social Painting,’” preferring to promote African American artists with the belief that “the excellence of his work will be the most effective blow against stereotype” [Ibid.]. He took this turn away from social realism in step with his colleagues in Abstract Expressionism, abandoning, with Ad Reinhardt, the treatment of art as an “entirely secondary medium for propaganda”—even as his own politics and artwork became more radical. Over a thirty-year period, beginning in 1946, Lewis produced a loose series of works taking the color black as their form and subject. Critics have been unable to resist reading these works as metaphorical commentary on race, above Lewis’s frequent protests to the contrary. The tension between the formalism he espoused and the identity politics that were never far from his thoughts propelled Lewis to extraordinary innovations in abstract painting.