This exhibition at Michael Rosenfeld pulls together work from Lewis’s career of over four decades, and focuses on how music served as a sustaining inspiration.
Painting, like music, had something inherent in itself which I had to discover and which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality.
With gossamer lines that float like musical notations over a resonant field of sound, Ode to Duke embodies Lewis’ career-long pursuit to translate the universalism he felt in music into a visual form. Accompanying the display of Lewis’ art are selections from the artist’s record collection of nearly 500 titles. Saved by his family and recently archived and cleaned for study and play, Lewis’ collection reveals the scope of his musical interests, which ranged from Johann Sebastian Bach to Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, and Joni Mitchell. The artist’s collection is notable not only for its breadth–it encompasses bebop, blues, classical, disco, funk, reggae, and soul as well as poetry by T. S.