“Untitled” (America)

American Totem is one of a series of black-and-white paintings that Norman Lewis made exploring the emotional and psychic impact of the civil rights movement. Lewis, one of the few Black artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, created a multivalent abstract form that evokes apparitions, skulls, masks, and the infamous hooded Klansman. As a “totem” or symbol of America, Lewis’s work suggests that the nation’s history of terror is both representable and abstract, conscious and unconscious, visible and hidden.