Art critic and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking Vision & Justice initiative, sparked by her 2016 guest-edited issue of Aperture of the same name revealing the role visual art plays in defining and challenging racial ideologies. Her continued collaboration with Aperture includes Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images (2024), the first posthumous collection of writings by art critic Maurice Berger, while her curatorial practice includes catalog contributions and an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Connecticut co-curated with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
In her latest book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024), Lewis extends her interests into investigations of how visual culture has historically been used as a tool to uphold the fallacy of a “White race,” particularly through the lens of the 19th-century Caucasus War. Lewis draws on art and literature to provide evidence of visual culture as critical to understanding race in America, including through Frank Duveneck’s painting “A Circassian” (1870), Frederick Douglass’s 1861 speech “Pictures and Progress,” and the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which idolized the Ku Klux Klan and was screened at the White House by then-President Woodrow Wilson.
Over two Zoom calls, before and after the United States Presidential election, I spoke with Lewis about The Unseen Truth, why she wasn’t surprised by the election results, and her latest book’s call to action: to question the fallacies at the very foundation of America’s racial order and the power of visual culture to shape our perception of the world. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hyperallergic: What do you think about the banning of books in America today, especially those related to critical race theory? Have any of the banned titles surprised you?
Sarah Lewis: Many seem to think that banning or censoring books that tell the full history in this country is new. What excited me most about writing The Unseen Truth was the ability to unveil the roots of censorship. The archive gives us the narrative scripts — the literal instruction manual that teachers used to offer rote lessons about global history. What it shows is how the omission of facts — deliberate and strategic — about the fabrication of the idea of racial order and superiority cohered into a kind of truth. In a racialized society, what is deliberately left legitimates racial domination. What we’re seeing today is part of an old playbook.
H: Why do you feel the topics that you’re wrestling with in your work are urgent and necessary?
SL: One of the most difficult aspects of being a citizen in the United States is telling the truthful story of who we are. The foundation of this country is built upon unspeakable tensions — between ideals that we love and hold dear, between liberty, equality, and slavery itself. Telling the full story of this country requires addressing the relationship between culture, art for justice, and politics. Until 10 years ago, we hadn’t fully understood what Frederick Douglass was talking about during the Civil War, when he wanted to speak about the importance of pictures for American progress. The late Congressman John Lewis understood the importance of visual narratives. We have many leaders, from Darren Walker to Bryan Stevenson to Sherrilyn Ifill to Carrie Mae Weems, who understand the work of cohering this relationship between art and politics — the unfinished chapter of the long civil rights movement.
H: What are you seeing in the world these days — or perhaps not seeing — that compels you to do this work?
SL: One of the most significant things we’re failing to see is the role that culture and art have long played in politics. But I’m inspired because we’re in a moment where the art world has some extraordinary entrants from the legal arena who understand this idea. For example, the Museum of Modern Art hosted the inimitable Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund, over the course of a year with her 14th Amendment Project, having her in conversation with Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others. Ifill recognized that we haven’t understood the importance of culture for our templates of national belonging and it signals how vital it is that we know what objects, artists, and thinkers are critical for understanding the power of vision and visuality for justice.
H: What are the challenges and obstacles to understanding visual culture and encouraging people to see it more clearly?
SL: One main problem is access. The institutions and even the frameworks for teaching the arts haven’t, until recently, embraced the broader landscape of visual culture. Because of the force of technology, many people aren’t studying art or aren’t training to be curators or art historians but they see the importance of visual culture for their varied fields of work. We are always teaching those who will and many who aren’t going to enter the discipline, but who will take those tools into their other fields. That’s important. That’s a lot of what excites me about how I teach at Harvard.
But it’s not only about access, it’s also about audience. I want to salute the late Maurice Berger, as this was one of his main insights about the power of culture for racial justice and why I am so thrilled that we just released Race Stories as the first volume of the Vision & Justice Book Series. Berger was an extraordinary cultural historian, writer, and curator who understood, perhaps better than most, the connection between racial literacy and visual literacy. He wanted to ensure that people within, and most importantly, beyond the art world saw how we understand race through pictures. This is something he valiantly addressed through his Race Stories column in the New York Times. We need to have writers like him who see their audience more broadly. That work is also what transforms access. We need to give people a broader gate through which to enter what happens in museums and galleries and in the arts in general.
H: What has shifted since you began your work with the Vision & Justice initiative? And what still needs to change?
SL: I’ve always been deeply committed to honoring the work of artists, and as a curator, I wanted to steward their work. Yet over time, I realized there were very few frameworks for thinking through the impact of cultural practices on American politics that didn’t become labeled “activist” or overtly political. One example came in 2021 when I was able to publish an anthology of the extraordinary Carrie Mae Weems with MIT Press. Through it, I realized that the critical reception of her work in terms of the nuance and volume of scholarship had not matched her massive impact on the culture. This had nothing to do with her work itself. She’s received the National Medal of Arts at the White House alongside Darren Walker and others and is rightly seen as a leader in the field and beyond.
But you have to run back the tape. There was such focus on her race for so long that there were few deep dives into the nuance of her aesthetic practice. It prevented her from having the kind of scholarship that her work merited, and it has impacted the very shape of the field itself, as the phenomenon has occurred for so many artists.
Another dramatic change is the sense of what’s required for racial justice. We’ve framed the subject of race as a conversation that we all need to participate in. But ultimately the dialogue on race isn’t enough. What’s needed are facts. When it comes to the unspeakable facts in the history of America, it’s largely the artists who’ve been willing to show us what others would not. When it comes to needing the facts, we need a Kerry James Marshall who’s going to talk about the history of racial terror through a work like “Heirlooms and Accessories” and make it plain to people. We need artists like Weems, like Marshall, who understand the work of culture for racial justice today.
What’s exciting is that we’re very much in the thick of that work. When I was younger, I wondered what it might have felt like to be alive during the Harlem Renaissance. But I don’t think I have to wonder anymore. We’re in one now.
In The Unseen Truth, there’s a chapter dedicated to the unsung hero of the Harlem Renaissance, Freeman Henry Morris Murray. He was the first art historian to write about the connection between race, politics, and aesthetics. In his book, Race and Emancipation in American Sculpture, Murray focused on public monuments, Confederate monuments. He gave voice to the relationship of art and culture to politics and justice in the United States that has been forgotten to history. We are in the moment that Murray anticipated today.
H: What are you working on in your teaching practice today?
SL: One of the main themes I address in my teaching practice and writing is that of the unseen. I also try to teach in ways that ensure that all see themselves as part of this work. One course I’m teaching, “Art of the Black World,” based on landmark exhibitions of African diasporic and Black art, is a very Black and Brown art history class, which is rare. When I was a student at Harvard taking art history classes, I was often the only student of color.
H: How do you feel that your books and writing are connected to your teaching?
SL: I ask myself, “How best can we contribute with the opportunities we have?” One way I’m doing that is by launching a new publishing initiative, the Vision & Justice book series co-edited with Deborah Wilis and Leigh Raiford, to tell a new story of the history of race, images, and justice. When you see works in the archive that have languished for over a century — a speech as nuanced and stunning and historically important as Frederick Douglass’s speech, “Pictures in Progress,” for example, that have not been picked up — and you have an opportunity to engage them, alongside other colleagues, take it. When you see that what Murray was up to hasn’t been dealt with — he was engaging with [W. E. B.] Du Bois long before Alain Locke on the topic of the arts and that hasn’t been discussed — you’ve got to take that opportunity to contribute.
And that’s the privilege, but that’s also the ethic of the scholar. As time passes, I see more clearly the invisible labor that comes with being a Black scholar in the academy. So much of that invisible labor, whether it’s mentorship or conversations that fall outside of that category, is still necessary to help the spirit and soul of the students you’re working with. Yet it can take away from the time needed to publish and to teach. There’s an injustice to that for the next generation. I am trying to stay as healthy and energized as I can, because I will always do both. I will always take the time to mentor, and I’m not going to let that compromise the time required to publish and get this work out there.
H: Is academia responding to the challenges before us effectively, and what could it do better?
SL: There is no shortage of challenges to academia at the moment. What I say to myself constantly as a result of those challenges is: “Don’t be distracted. You know what you’re here to do.”
H: What about racialization and visual culture do people get wrong or think they know but should re-examine? How can they understand it differently?
SL: Most underestimate the role visual culture has played in creating narratives that have legitimated racial regimes in the United States. When I teach about Japanese internment — the internment of Japanese-American citizens for up to three years — students are stunned to see that the federal government hired photographers to document that then-legal practice and to legitimate it. Dorothea Lange was one, hired by the Office of War Information to document Japanese internment. When younger generations look at these photographs, they have evidence of the visual propaganda used by the government.
H: What role do museums play in the dissemination of images?
SL: Museum collections are so vast that the important question has long been: How do museums make decisions about what to show? Many museums increasingly see the role they can play as conveners to offer an arena to process the images on their walls, beyond public programming. With the demise of public spaces for ideas, museums in particular are best equipped to serve as a site for vital conversations because of both distance from and foundational connections to politics.
H: Now that the results are in and Trump has been elected, how are you reflecting on the urgency of your work in this moment?
SL: I’m considering deeply what my contribution is, not to the next four years, but to the generation of which I’m a part. There’s potential to get caught up in the next four years but I anticipated that we would be here. As a cultural historian, I’ve spent the last 10 years researching the blueprint that the federal government has long used to instantiate racial regimes. The Unseen Truth shows the scaffolding that helps us to understand how we’ve arrived at this moment. I’m encouraged by the contributions that I hope will allow people to really see the roots of the regimes we’re living in today.
H: Have you been surprised by anything since the election and the rhetoric that’s come out — the way that people are framing the results and talking about the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris?
SL: What has surprised me relates to the importance the media has given to spectacle as a metric for determining enthusiasm. It may seem strange to say that’s a problem because we’ve probably always shown our support publicly at rallies and gatherings. It’s crucial to grasp how much that led many people to believe that the race was as close as it was. Yet racial regimes in the United States have been cohered through silence, through what’s not said. That’s what we missed. And I think that’s why many were so taken by the surprise of the size of Trump’s win. It makes sense that we would focus on spectacle. There were massive displays of visual responses to Vice President Kamala Harris. Within days of Biden announcing that he would not run, there was this tsunami of visuals and memes and stories on social media that told another story — they spoke to how many of the things some people held against her allowed her to connect with a broad swath of Americans. Yet the reliance on spectacle in politics in this era, with Trump as a candidate, was deceptive. This is part of the problem.
Let me make it concrete and historic: When Woodrow Wilson enabled federal segregation in the early 20th century, for example, he did so without saying a word. Wilson denied that segregation was taking place. This is the most important tactic for understanding the moods of this past presidential political campaign. The signs indicating segregation in the federal government were so rare that there’s only one photograph that exists today of it at all, so that blueprint really has been lost in history. When I say I wasn’t surprised, it’s because I’m a historian.
H: How have your investigations into visual culture helped you better understand its power over this election?
SL: I’m sitting in thought post-election deeply grateful for the indispensable work of culture in this political era. I heard that J.D. Vance spoke about the influence of Boyz n the Hood on Joe Rogan’s podcast, mentioning it as a film that profoundly influenced his worldview. He described watching the film multiple times when he was young. I know John Singleton didn’t see that coming.
If we don’t honor the work that film, that visual culture, that monuments have played in shaping political policies, we are lost. Culture offers the clarity we need in an era where, if Project 2025 is to be believed, many initiatives and policies are going to feel unspeakable, inconceivable. This is often, historically, when culture steps in, when the work of visual representation steps in to make plain what can’t be addressed any other way.
This moment offers an opportunity to salute the unsung early cultural workers and civil rights workers in the United States who understood the power of culture for moments like this. Freeman Henry Morris Murray was really the first person to understand how monuments were used to declare the extension of Jim Crow rule before anyone else. He publishes his book in 1916 because he understands that he is living in a regime that is unspeakable to such a degree that he looks to the signals and signs that the erection of these monuments created. He recognizes that these public works are speaking for the federal government via proxy.
For example, during Wilson’s administration, the Lincoln Memorial was under construction, but so was Georgia Stone Mountain dedicated to the Confederacy in 1915. This is a moment when Woodrow Wilson was screening The Birth of a Nation at the White House. Here we began to see the function and true roles that monuments play in the cultural landscape. What we need to do now is to really salute the scaffolding, the foundations, and the writing of people like Murray who can offer us the guides to think through why culture matters so much today. Culture is how we understand the world.
