Tony Lewis

Background

Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles, California, United States.

Education

Tony Lewis received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington and Jefferson College in 2008. In a couple of years, he did his postgraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A Master of Fine Arts degree followed in 2012.

Career

From the very begging of his career as an artist, Tony Lewis has dealt with graphite powder and colored pencil firstly using the floor as a canvas for his large artworks. Impressed by the volume of H. Jackson Brown, Jr. called ‘Life's Little Instruction Book’ containing a number of postulates which, on Lewis’s mind, reflected conventional American wisdom, the artist started to place his drawings on the wall.

Since then, Lewis has erased, edited, and regrouped words from a variety of the sources, including political speeches, word games, and automatic writings, to express his view on hidden authoritarianism and hostility of American society.

Lewis has exhibited throughout the United States, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., Shane Campbell Gallery, as well as Massimo de Carlo in Milan, Italy, and in London. The artist also took part in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Tony Lewis currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Achievements

• 

  Tony Lewis is an accomplished artist whose artworks are widely recognized.
  
  His art is acquired by many prestigious collections, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
  
  In 2017, Lewis was given Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award from the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. He has also been a recipient of School of the Art Institute of Chicago Scholarship, Rosaline Cohn Scholarship, and Archibald Motley Jr. Award SAIC Graduate Fellowship.
  
  In 2014, Lewis’s drawing ‘Ron’ was purchased at Sotheby's in New York City for $93,750.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • The Gravamen of Mr. Baldwin's Charges Against America

• drawing

  • Color Roloc

  • no

  • Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier

  • foace

  • thep poof

  • peoplecol

  • roloc red eht dna

  • cocoa

  • f told o

  • Wave at Children on School Buses

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • ...Also Known As Gym Class

  • Nobody Likes My Great Ideas In Action

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Nes

  • I Don't Know Why I Even Talk To You Before Dinner

  • They're Not Supposed To Like It!

Views

Quotations: "One of the reasons why I love stenography is that it opens up a world of abstraction. It’s a free-flowing movement of my body – a word is a series of loops, of stretching my arm as long as I can. I’m thinking less about the meaning of the word and more about the meaning of making a gesture."

"There is no instant cure for the race problem in America, and anyone who tells you that there is… is a charlatan and ultimately a boring man – a boring man precisely because he is then speaking in the kind of abstractions that do not relate to the human experience."