Vulpes Bastille presents the solo exhibition of Art by .E Lewis featuring 20 large-scale, hanging textiles depicting the artist's creative journey and the journey of her ancestors to and in America.

Art by .E Lewis is a creative, proactive and transformative textile and performing artist possessing the innovative capability to formulate fabrics and seams into wonderful stories. Her visionary process evokes and informs viewers by exploring tangible and verbal artforms. Her art quilts, abstracts and panels are assembled with adinkra symbols, feathers, gems, prints, patterns, and denim.

E Lewis has been featured in 29 exhibitions since 2020, including solo exhibitions at Vulpes Bastille, the Kansas City Public Library, the Black Archives of Mid-America, Bunker Center for the Arts, and Holsum Art Gallery, among many others. As a Certified National Storyteller, she leads storytelling events and art-making workshops, inviting the community into every part of her process.

E Lewis shares the history of African-Americans’ journey to and in America through art and storytelling. In 2021, she developed and implemented a traveling exhibit, performance, and art class in alliance with the Black Archives of Mid-America, Do Good Co, and The Sewing Labs to educate guests through the exploration of three styles of art.

My work merges the concepts of Venus as an abstract deity and as a celestial body. These women I paint are evolutions of the goddess Venus – modernizations of those ancient archetypes.  Instead of the classical symbol for love and beauty, I portray her as an oceanic alien life form, floating between futuristic and primordial worlds, unconstrained by time or reality. I explore the relationship between women's bodies and bodies of water. Female identity has always been the focal point of my work, encompassing ideas of empowerment, evolution, balance and duality.

YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU ONCE WERE features photography, painting, sculptures, videos, and installations created by the artist over the past 15 years of his career as a visual creator. This expansive retrospective installation includes the exterior facade of a house, complete with a window and a door by which the viewer enters into a temporary home, complete with a bed, bathroom, living room, and dining room. Hundreds if not thousands of images are presented in an overwhelming display of volume. With plenty of seating to sit and relax, each visitor has ample time to respond to the bountiful visual array.

Throughout the month of February, Vulpes Bastille and the artist offer programming including an open-mic and open-studio evening, live figure-drawing event, and Valentine’s card-making workshop. The full schedule can be found on the artist’s website and will be announced on social media.

Artist Statement

“This is an intense show title,” I think to myself as I hand-cut each letter out of the sizeable eight-by-twelve-foot photograph printed on vinyl. Each letter is left partially attached, the remnants draping over the front of the piece, leaving behind empty letter-shaped voids exposing the white gallery wall, colorfully backlit in subtle hues. At first, one may think this show title is a pejorative statement, perhaps directed at a friend, lover, or family member - lamenting how they have changed and are no longer the person they used to be. Conversely, this statement is self-directed and acknowledges personal evolution and growth - a requiem for a former version of myself.

As an artist and photographer, I have been experimenting with mediums, materials, processes, and frameworks throughout my career. My interest in tarot, astrology, and other forms of divination led me to an interesting development in the production of this solo exhibition by means of Archeiomancy - using archives as a methodical framework for the exhibition. Taking nearly 15 years of work, spanning 2008 to today, I revisit the old work with new eyes and compare and contrast my working methods, visual messaging, and experimental processes. Looking back, I no longer recognize the person I once was. I became disinterested in what I once considered my “best work,” and discovered a new interest in the mistakes I made along the way. Using a pendulum, my tarot deck, astrology, and numerology as a decision-making methodology, I allow my subconscious to select the work presented in this exhibition and allow for a new narrative to be woven from my archive of digital and physical works.

Printing hundreds of photographs from my digital archive, ranging from 35mm negative scans from my early days of analog experimentation to more recent digital photographs, some images are printed and exhibited for the very first time. Expanding upon this further, I used various forms of bleach baths and sprays to alter these images, removing some of the contexts, and bringing out new forms, compositions, and visual intrigue. In the lyrics from the song “Kids” by MGMT, they sing, “Memories fade, like looking in a fogged mirror,” which I feel appropriately comments on my process of slowly destroying these images, leaving behind only remnants as the viewer is left to decipher the elusive vestiges. The process not only creates beautiful marks, textures, and colors but also comments on our own memories and how they fade over time, tasking our minds to fill in the missing pieces.