Norman Lewis was the only Black artist to participate in the famous closed-door sessions at Studio 35 that would come to define Abstract Expressionism in 1950. In Barker and Crowd, which he painted for friends who lived near him in Harlem, an abstraction of silhouetted figures gathers before a fiery glow whose energy perhaps refers to the burning rhetoric of the stump speakers, or “barkers,” who incited street crowds in Harlem to take action for civil rights—a movement to which Lewis was personally committed.