Norman Wilfred Lewis was born in Harlem, New York to Bermudan parents. He was interested in art from his childhood and, inspired by Alain Locke and his New Negro Movement, he was excited about African art. From 1933 to 1935, he met the sculptor Augusta Savage who was one of the most important African-American art educator and enrolled in her Savage School of Arts and Crafts. And this is Norman's early education. 

Lewis ceased painting Social Realist works in the early 1940s because he found the style was not effective to counter racism. Then in the mid-1940s, Lewis began to experiment with pure abstraction, and became active in the New York and Abstract Expressionism and hosted his first solo exhibition in 1949. One of his great contribution to the art world is, in 1963, Lewis was a founding member of SPIRAL, a group of black artists committed to assist the ongoing Civil Rights Movement through art. In the later part of his life, Lewis mainly focused on painting the natural world.