Storing Up Sensation

The Spotlight series at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Shannon T. Lewis’s Storing Up Sensation, 2023, with a text by author and writer Jasmin Hernandez (exerpt below). Exhibition dates: November 29, 2023 - January 20, 2024

Lewis, an Afro-Trinidadian artist born and raised in Toronto, and based in Berlin, constructs lush surreal worlds where Black women come to play, luxuriate, or just be pensive. In these worlds, her Black femme figures are really passing through portals that question their race, gender, socio-economic class, and immigration status. “My work is about mobility, whether it’s social, emotional, or also just citizenship, and the performance involved in traveling through different spaces,” she reveals. In her canvases, often diptychs and triptychs, she conjures disembodied Black femme figures in the fantastical and decked out in high fashion. Heads and hands, or just legs, draped in opulent garments and accessories. These collage elements originate from her love for fashion magazines; she keeps a large collection of them stacked and organized in her Berlin studio.

Growing up with Vogue and Essence, she’d cut out images, and study the ways Black women are presented in visual culture. By scrapbooking, Lewis created her own personal archives. She calls it a “choice”, by “weaving your own narrative” based on what’s offered. Especially, when what’s offered has been historically problematic and exclusionary, primarily with top (and very white) fashion publications from the 1960s through the last decade. Black women, as both supermodels and celebrities, rarely appeared on mainstream magazine covers, and, when they did, white creative teams styled and photographed them through a racist and fetishistic lens.

Excerpt of  "Sitting in Splendor" by author and writer Jasmin Hernandez