Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Doris Lindo Lewis, artist

[I wrote this myself, but a web page copied it, and my posting was disallowed. But I wrote it. Please post. jd-glover@comcast.net. Former editor at The Christian Science Monitor]

DORIS LINDO LEWIS bio 1909-1995 Considered America's First Woman Surrealist Painter noted among other stylistic unique features for inclusion of native plants and nature in her work

“ . . . a remarkably sophisticated talent.” —Ilene Fort, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“ . . . Lewis’s vision is celebratory and powerful.” —Erica Hirshler, Curator of American Paintings, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

“Lewis was one of the few artists in New England in the 1930’s to explore veristic surrealism, a form of surrealism in which each element of the composition is rendered in painstaking detail. She was also familiar with dream analysis and Andre Breton’s declarations on ‘convulsive beauty.’” —Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec

Artist and environmentalist, Doris ("Dolly") Lindo Lewis (Henriquez) divided her life among New York, Massachusetts, the Caribbean, and South Florida. Her paternal grandparents descended from old New England families and built a house on Boston's Marlborough Street when the Back Bay neighborhood first opened. Later the family moved to Cambridge, where several in-laws had lived for many years; one had married Longfellow's artist son, Ernest.

On her mother's side, Lewis descended from the prominent "Anglo" Lindo family of the Caribbean. Her Park Avenue grandfather was one of the eight partners of Lindo Brothers, which owned extensive plantations for coffee, bananas, and sugar in Jamaica and Costa Rica, as well as the J. Wray rum company, the Daniel Finzi wine and spirit business, and properties in Jamaica, including land on the north coast, some of which was later developed into resorts. They also founded the Bank of Costa Rica.

Born in 1909 at the Cecil Lindo (her great uncle) Historic House on Parque Morazan in San Jose, Costa Rica, Lewis returned to a family plantation "El Sitio" at Juan Vinas with her father, Sidney Lewis (of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) and her mother, Daisy ("Mimi") Lindo Lewis (later Voorhis). For a few years just before and during World War I, Sidney Lewis ran mining interests out of Wheeling, West Virginia, but decided to return to Costa Rica in 1919 when his daughter was ten.

The family stopped in New York on the way, staying with Doris Lindo Lewis's grandfather, August Lindo, on Park Avenue, where he lived across the street from the family of J. D. Salinger. Before embarking, her father traveled alone to Cambridge to visit his mother for a few days and suddenly died, perhaps a victim of the flu epidemic. After her father's death, Lewis was taken by her mother to live with members of the Lindo family in Jamaica for one year, possibly at her Great Uncle Robert's plantation, "Sunnyside," two miles outside of Linstead.

Then Lewis and her mother migrated to Cambridge to live near her deceased father's family. There she was listed in the Social Register, "came out" as a deb at Brattle Hall, and was photographed by Bachrach. In the Boston area she attended the Buckingham School, the May School, and the Museum School.

Summering on Cape Cod from the middle 1920’s and moving to South Yarmouth about 1934, she broke with "society," and Lewis at a young age became associated with a group of New York, Boston, and Cape Cod artists and writers: Van Gogh's acquaintance, Dodge McKnight (also, friend of Isabella Steward Gardner), poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, and novelist Malcolm Lowry. Lowry wrote perhaps his most famous letter to her—a 30-page love letter, which has been placed with the Ransom Center of the University of Texas.

Artists who were associates included Howard Gibbs (whose first-class "Still Life" Lewis owned), Harold Dunbar (who painted her portrait, and she, one of him), Byron Thomas (whose fine "The Skater" she owned), Frederick Wight (later associated with UCLA), Dodge McKnight (Lewis owned a McKnight watercolor), and Alice Stallknecht (who did two portraits of her).

For over sixty years, Lewis was a long-time friend of Catherine Huntington, who owned the Provincetown Playhouse and kept Eugene O'Neill's plays alive during the 1940's. She painted Huntington's portrait, showing in 1933 at an invitational Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit, sponsored by the New England Society of Contemporary Art. The exhibit also included a painting by Diego Rivera.

Summering in her late teens on Cape Cod, Doris Lindo Lewis at first painted typical Cape landscapes in oil, which exhibited in Cambridge in the very late 1920's. But almost immediately after, she produced a strong body of surrealistic oils, which showed at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Provincetown Art Association, and other locations. She also painted in New York and Boston. This ground-breaking surrealism documents an internal journey; they have been called "portraits of consciousness." She is also noted, similar to Frieda Kahlo, for inclusion of native plants and nature in her works.

Through her mother's family, Lewis maintained keen interest in the Caribbean and in 1937 married Anglo-Jamaican Edward Henriquez in Havana, where she spent the next twelve years. Henriquez had been educated at Belmont Hill School outside Boston, founded partially for him and his brother Norcutt by the Atkins family, who had extensive sugar holdings in Cuba and land in Belmont.

An "Anglo," Lewis—unlike many North Americans—showed great interest in and love for both native peoples, Cuban Hispanics and Blacks. Briefly in the early 1940's—when her husband's sailboat was being built—Lewis lived under modest conditions among Afro-Cuban sugarcane workers some distance from the cultivation of Havana.

During the day the men toiled in the fields, and Lewis was struck by the spiritual faces of the women and children left at home—their long-suffering and innocence. The only art materials she had with her were conte pencils and a sketchpad. And so were born 25 character-full portraits in an exhibit, "Faces of Afro Cuba," which showed posthumously at the African Meeting House on Boston’s Beacon Hill in 1996. During her years in Cuba, she also painted many land- and townscapes, as well as collecting Caribbean seashells, two of which were named after her.

In 1949 Doris Lindo Lewis returned to the States to live in Florida for the rest of her life. There, in addition to pursuing her own artwork in hard-edge paintings, modernist oils, iron sculpture, and pottery, she personally encouraged artists, potters, and gardeners, as well as serving on various county- and state-wide boards and founding the Ceramic League of Palm Beach County. She also performed a busy, vocal, and courageous role in Florida's environmental affairs and is credited by Marjory Stoneman Douglas as one of the leading activists to save the Everglades. She died in 1995 at her home in West Palm Beach.

In 2012 Lewis's work was discovered by Ilene Fort, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her painting was included in the museum's remarkable, pioneering international exhibit, "In Wonderland."

In 2013 Lewis paintings became part of the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Washington's Corcoran Gallery, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.