Flora Carnell Lewis

Flora Carnell Lewis was born on January 12, 1903, and raised in Atchison, Kansas. She was a self-taught artist who specialized in painting. She began painting when she was around six years old. Lewis also was a seamstress later in her life and worked in needlework, knitting, crochet and embroidery.

In 1933, Flora Lewis won a prize at the Chicago World’s Fair for a painted pillow titled Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me. In August 1939, Lewis’ painting Farm Life won the first prize in the amateur art competition at the Missouri State Fair. The painting, a landscape farm scene with animals, a house, and a portrait of Percy and Flora Lewis in a horse-drawn buggy, was painted with oil and aluminum shellac on muslin in a folk art style. Lewis said that she made the painting for her husband.

A controversy began when the other artists entered in the contest protested the painting taking the first prize, over the lack of perspective in the painting’s composition. The judge of the competition was Austin Faricy, aesthetics professor at Stephens College for Women in Columbia, Missouri. He stated that Farm Life was “the finest example of primitive art I ever have seen” (Kansas City Star, August 23, 1939). The painting was also shown at a “tea” at the Big Sister Home in Kansas City in early October 1939.

Farm Life was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a part of the Contemporary Unknown American Painters exhibition in 1939. According to They Taught Themselves, Lewis was the only Missouri artist and the only African American woman artist represented in the exhibition.

Flora Lewis also made religious paintings with Christian subjects such as Christ and the Woman at the Well. These were made for ministers who displayed them in church as an illustration for their sermon.

Flora died on January 27, 1972, in Atchison, Kansas, and is interred at Oak Hill Cemetery.