"Lewis has quickly established himself in the contemporary art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction, and his monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political."—Melissa Chiu, Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Tony Lewis expands the conceptual and material possibilities of drawing in a practice that spans large-scale works on paper, sculpture, collages, digital projections, and site-specific installations.

Language, and its formal and material qualities, are central subjects in Lewis' work. Examining semiotics and drawing as parallel forms of abstraction, he appropriates and adapts forms including the Roman alphabet and the phonetic symbols used in stenography. In his vibrant Shorthand series, Lewis invents and utilizes a signature glyph alphabet based on bisecting lines and biomorphic planes of color encoded with references to specific historical or current events that engage with themes of race, power, and communication. Lewis' work suggests that, as with any social system, language both reflects and actively impacts the Black American experience. 

Working with materials such as powdered graphite, pencil, torn paper, and a range of handmade and found surfaces, Lewis' practice is deliberately one of intense exertion. Whether the steadfast application of unruly materials, hours of repetitive shading, or the hand-installation of large-scale commissions, the artist's mark-making is an embodiment of labor. Lewis' physical manipulation of visual systems of language - his erasure, distortion, destruction, as well as the emphatic insertion of his own biography and experiences—turns source material into poetic fragment, bringing forth the subtler ways in which meaning is established and transformed over time.