At her commencement ceremony last May, Aura Lewis (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay 2017) boldly walked across the stage and approached the commencement speaker, activist Gloria Steinem, after being handed her diploma. Lewis wasn’t able to speak to Steinem but pressed into her hands a packet of illustrations and a letter explaining where they came from: Lewis had spent the last year and a half working on a children’s book about the iconic feminist and wanted to share it with her subject and source of inspiration as directly as she could. “It was very quick but she acknowledged it,” Lewis said. “She opened the letter on stage—and we have it on video—and then she later posted one of the images that I gave her on her Instagram. So that was amazing.” Cut to less than a year later and that book, Gloria’s Voice, was released by Sterling Publishing last week, officially debuting March 6.

A New York-based illustrator, Lewis is also an author, designer, and mother of two young daughters. Gloria’s Voice is her first book and was developed during her time at SVA; her second book, The Illustrated Feminist, which charts 100 years of U.S. feminist history, will be published in 2020, coinciding with the centennial of women’s suffrage. In February, Lewis spoke as part of Alumni Affairs’ panel discussion Let’s Talk: Women in the Creative Industries. A life-long drawer, Lewis came to the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program after an undergraduate degree in psychology, stints in painting and graphic design, and a lot of soul-searching in Argentina with her family. “It was a career shift for me,” she explained. “Working as a graphic designer, it wasn't fulfilling for me from a creative point of view. I really wanted to be a content creator, to tell stories and use color and draw people and just make images.”

Lewis’ participation in last month’s 'Let's Talk' panel highlighted her indirect, though seemingly inevitable, path to illustration, the challenges of managing her time while working at home and her belief in sharing the floor with others when it comes to matters of artistic representation. Below, we delve further into her practice and its particular resonance within this moment’s women’s movement.

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