From the Margins

"This exhibition brings together two New York painters whose works offer unique and compelling approaches to abstraction. Born one year apart, Lee Krasner (1908-84) and Norman Lewis (1909-79) shared similar family situations and came of age in the economic, social, and historic complexities of the 1930s. They formed their creative identities in the artistic and cultural ferment of New York City that was to catapult it to the center of the art world after World War II. Lee Krasner was born in Brooklyn to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. She studied at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. From 1934 through 1943 she supervised a section of the mural division of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Krasner married the painter Jackson Pollock in 1945. Norman Lewis' parents were immigrants from Bermuda. His family lived on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.^ He studied drawing and commercial design in high school before joining the merchant marine and sailing throughout the Caribbean and South America. In the early 1930s Lewis worked with Augusta Savage, the founder and director of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem. Like Krasner, he was a bene