Wednesday, May 13, 5pm
509 West 27th Street, New York
On the occasion of Tony Lewis: Abstract Slavery, the Chicago-based artist's first New York solo exhibition, Olney Gleason will host a conversation between Lewis and curator Ellen Tani at the gallery. The pair will discuss the three interrelated bodies of work on view in Lewis's exhibition – Word Search, Gregg Shorthand, and White Drawings – which are unified by a sustained investigation of the Atlantic slave trade through the material and conceptual possibilities of drawing. They will also discuss Lewis’s immersive Floor Drawings, installed in the gallery and made by manually rubbing graphite powder on large expanses of paper.
The program takes place on Wednesday, March 13 at 509 West 27th Street, New York. Doors will open at 5pm, and the conversation will begin promptly at 5:30. Attendance is free. Please RSVP to rsvp@olneygleason.com.
Tony Lewis lives and works in Chicago. He expands the conceptual and material possibilities of drawing in a practice that spans large-scale works on paper, sculpture, collage, digital projection, and site-specific installation. Examining semiotics and drawing as parallel forms of abstraction, Lewis appropriates and adapts forms including the Roman alphabet and the phonetic symbols used in stenography. His work is collected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Ellen Tani is an art historian and curator based in Rochester, NY, where she is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. A specialist in contemporary art’s intersection with critical race studies, with a particular focus on conceptual- and performance-oriented practices, Dr. Tani uses methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of power, gender, and race and ethnicity from the 20th century to the global present. Her current book manuscript explores the career of conceptual artist Charles Gaines.
Event Details
Doors open at 5:00pm; Conversation begins promptly at 5:30pm
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
509 West 27th Street, New York
RSVP
To reserve your place, please contact rsvp@olneygleason.com.
For more information on Tony Lewis, please contact info@olneygleason.com.
