Street Music—Jenkins Band

Norman Lewis created this painting as an homage to Edmund Jenkins, an African American composer and bandleader who gained fame in Europe during World War I. Lewis studied under Harlem Renaissance sculptor and art teacher Augusta Savage and began his career as a Social Realist. He started to paint in a more abstract style by the mid-1940s. By 1949 he was represented by the Willard Gallery and had his first solo show. He was the only African American artist included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1951 exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, where he exhibited alongside other well-known Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning. In the 1960s, Lewis cofounded Spiral artists' collective with Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Richard Mayhew to address African American political concerns as they related to art.