Tony Lewis, born in 1986 in Los Angeles, employs graphite powder to explore social and political issues related to race, power, communication, and labor. This medium serves as both a literal and conceptual foundation for his work, as he stretches, smudges, and manipulates the powder across various handmade and found surfaces. Embracing the unruliness of graphite, Lewis allows it to settle and mark paper indiscriminately, treating his graphite-slick studio floor as a tool akin to a pencil. His early site-specific floor drawings highlighted this relationship with the medium, leading to his transition from floor to wall-based work.

Inspired by the conventional wisdom found in H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s Life’s Little Instruction Book, Lewis began creating small drawings based on its pages, eventually expanding into large-scale wall pieces made with black screws and graphite-soaked rubber bands. These labor-intensive works critique the covert authoritarianism of American culture. In his latest series, Lewis collages altered cells from Calvin and Hobbes, using erasure and reassembly to further challenge the boundaries of drawing and the materiality of language. Currently based in Chicago, his work has been featured in notable exhibitions, including recent solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Rose Art Museum, and he participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.