Joe Lewis (artist)


Joe Lewis is an African-American visual artist, photographer, musician, and art critic. His visual art often focuses on digital manipulations of the image. His work is represented by The Phatory in New York City.

Life and work

Lewis received his M.F.A. in 1989 from Maryland Institute, College of Art and a bachelor’s in 1975 from Hamilton College, where he was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. Lewis was also a post-graduate student at CAiiA : the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts: Sciences, Technology and Art Research, at the University of Plymouth.
Lewis was co-founding director of Fashion Moda in New York, where he curated and mounted numerous exhibitions and performance events. He also early on has been associated with Colab and ABC No Rio and has thus lectured extensively on public art, community-based artmaking and the alternative space movement.
He has written on art for Art in America, The LA Weekly and Artforum, and has been published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals.
As a visual artist, photographer, conceptual artist and performing artist, Lewis has had numerous exhibitions of his work both nationally and internationally and has participated in several residency programs including Anderson Ranch, CO; Cité des Artes in Paris; and the Darkroom Projectes in Milan. In 2008, he was named New York Foundation for the Arts Deutsche Bank Fellow in Photography.
Lewis has served as chair at the Department of Art at California State University, Northridge from 1995 to 2001, and as a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts from 1991 to 1995. Lewis also has been dean of the School of Art & Design in the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in New York, which boasts a rigorous curriculum with significant interdisciplinary partnerships between art and technology and as dean of the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

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