To See is to Cite: A Conversation with Honorary Degree Recipient Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis

by Zindzi Harley, Cohort ’24

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April 13, 2026, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis in anticipation of her receiving an honorary degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). As a third-year doctoral student, independent curator, and David C. Driskell Fellow ‘24 whose research centers on Afro-feminist contributions to museums and cultural institutions, I found this conversation to be not only personally meaningful but deeply resonant with the very questions IDSVA was founded to ask. Dr. Lewis’s work as a scholar, curator, critic, and teacher has redefined how we understand art’s role in shaping civic life, racial formation, and historical memory. The interview took place on the heels of her commencement address, where she would receive an honor that, as she told me, she never quite expected to receive this early in her career.

Intervening in the Discipline

I opened by asking Dr. Lewis how her work as a scholar, curator, and critic has intervened in or shifted institutional narratives within art history and visual culture. Her answer was expansive and precise in equal measure.

“We all have a role to play in our understanding of how the arts move societies,” she said. “The work of scholarship really addresses often key omissions and provides critical corrections in the canon.”

She identified two related problems she has worked to address: first, that aesthetics have not been sufficiently examined for their role in constructing racial formation; and second, that Black culture has been over-displayed in institutions while remaining under-theorized in historical narratives. For Dr. Lewis, scholarship is corrective and built to last. “The work of scholarship,” she said, “will outlast the work of our generation and hopefully contribute to the foundation we’re laying for the next.” She named Deborah Willis as a formative mentor, someone who helped her understand how exhibition, scholarship, and mentorship work in concert over time.

Navigating the Tension

I asked Dr. Lewis how she navigates the tension between working within institutions that have historically excluded or marginalized the very contributions she champions, especially given the current political climate, including federal executive orders that she described as an attempt to allow propaganda to shape the archive.

Her answer was one of the most striking moments of our conversation. Rather than describing paralysis or fear, she described a process of transformation, of turning institutional resistance into creative fuel.

“The heat of the moment,” she said, has “intensified into a kind of light” that allows her to point in the direction she’s always wanted to go. She has not had to change what she teaches. In fact, she noted that the March 2025 White House executive order had only underscored, for colleagues and students alike, why the study of art as it relates to race matters so urgently.

She has remained consistent across every platform, from a keynote at the United Nations General Assembly for the International Day for the Elimination of Racism, to the classroom. “I’ve just been inspired,” she said, “by the commitment that this moment has brought out of so many of us.”

Citation as Honor, Offering, and Path Forward

Among the most generative parts of our exchange was a discussion of citational practice, a subject close to my own research. I asked Dr. Lewis how she approaches citation as a way of redistributing visibility and power.

“Citational practices become a way of according honor,” she said, “to those who make you possible.” She pointed to the way that social media conditions people to present opinions without attribution—a sharp contrast to the arena of scholarship, where ideas are built through dialogue, affirmation, and critique across generations of thinkers.

Her most recent book, The Unseen Truth, contains 100 pages of footnotes, a fact that sparked inspiration and curiosity concluding my close reading. She described how the book itself grew from a single footnote in Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom: a tantalizing reference to Woodrow Wilson’s interest in the appearance of women from the Caucasus region, which opened the door to excavating the fiction of white racial identity and the entire regime of racial domination. From a footnote, a book.

“Citations are never limitations,” she said. “They’re always opportunities and guides and paths and offerings to others.”

Worldbuilding and the Future of Art History

I asked Dr. Lewis how she sees Afro-feminist intellectual labor shaping the future of art history and criticism. Her framing was characteristically clear-eyed.

“The irony of the art world,” she said, “is that it is not effectively the world of art.” It does not contain the full extent of human creativity because of how narrowly we have defined what matters. “When we speak of worldbuilding practices”, she argued, “what we are really saying is that we need to finally honor the full extent of creativity in the world, not as a political exercise, but as an overdue correction. Everyone benefits. Not just us.”

She described her career as a sustained audit of what the field is failing to address and a commitment to contributing solutions rather than critique alone. The Vision & Justice Book Series, for example, emerged from the belated recognition of photographers, including Coreen Simpson, who received her first monograph at age 83 despite decades of significant impact. The series now creates a home for projects devoted to spotlighting those whose contributions have gone unacknowledged.

She also spoke about Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress” speech, delivered during the Civil War, in which Douglass suggested it might take 150 years for society to fully reckon with the power of visual culture. “I see us in the headwaters of that idea,” she said.

What the Honorary Degree Means

When I asked what receiving this honorary degree from IDSVA means to her, Dr. Lewis was moved and characteristically generous in redirecting the honor outward.

“I never would have expected to be at a place in my career where in my forties I’m receiving honorary degrees,” she said. “It shocks me.” This will be her second, with Pratt Institute having awarded the first, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design following shortly after IDSVA.

But for Dr. Lewis, the degree is less about individual recognition, but about saluting the community gathering around a set of ideas—the idea that the artist is a civic actor, that the extended civil rights movement cannot go forward without understanding narrative as a force against propaganda, and that the work of scholarship, curation, and mentorship are all part of the same project.

She closed with advice she offered to emerging scholars, though she said we’d have to wait for the commencement address for the full version: “Don’t only focus on your passion. Ask what you’re not seeing in the field, and why. And focus on that.” For those of us in this program building our research at the intersection of philosophy, visual culture, and the question of what it means to be human, it is both a charge and an invitation.

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Works Cited

Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth. The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024.

Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth. Personal interview conducted by Zindzi Harley. 13 Apr. 2026.

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