On the Cover: Norman Lewis, Bonfire

At over five feet in height and four feet in width, this oil on canvas work ignites energy in a space in much the same way as the event of its title. Lewis was born and raised in Harlem and later was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild, which supported burgeoning artists in the neighborhood. Reproducing his work on the cover thus appropriately encloses the pages comprising the mighty theme of this issue: Harlem.

This energetic painting from 1962 reveals manifold experiences: the artist’s high-spirited neighborhood, his context as a Black man living throughout the turbulent twentieth century in the United States, the dissipation of abstract expressionism as the en vogue style in the art world, and the false dichotomy between jubilant and disquieting times.

In the years leading up to this painting’s completion, the civil rights movement reached a certain combustion point—including the May 1961 attacks on Freedom Riders (interracial groups of people protesting segregated bus terminals), in which supremacists burned their bus outside of Anniston, Alabama. No doubt was Lewis well aware of the historical use of fire for violent manipulations, and perhaps this inhumanity sparked a reaction.

A year after finishing Bonfire, Lewis cofounded the influential Spiral group along with artists Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Hale Woodruff. Spiral met in Bearden's loft to discuss how, when, why, and if African American artists should, could, and would assert their art into the fight for racial equity.

Around the blue edges of the hottest part of the flame in Bonfire dance hieroglyphic-like creatures. The artist's undertaking of Spiral inserts a key significance to these fire revelers—they are at once merely shapes in a composition and redolent figures engaged in a convocation, manifesting a protective ring against the blaze of political circumstance. Here, Lewis's signature abstract-but-not-quite-ness shines through, perhaps evoking the fuzzy refraction of a revolution’s progress.

In a pamphlet for Spiral, collectively written, the artists state: "As a symbol for the group we chose a spiral—a particular kind of spiral, the Archimedean one; because, from a starting point, it moves outward embracing all directions, yet constantly upward." This embracing, multidirectional, upward ethos could easily describe Bonfire. And, perhaps the fire as a symbol might enhance this auspicious spiral with its own properties: that of life, change, destruction, promise, gathering, communion, and signal.