Meet the Team

Ann Lewis
Artist and Founder

Ann Lewis is a multidisciplinary activist artist. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, her career began in the street art world of New York City and has evolved into large-scale public works, monumental installations, and kinetic sculpture. Her mural See Her received an Americans for the Arts 2018 Public Art Network (PAN) Award. Ann’s art has been acquired by the New York Historical Society Museum and the US Library of Congress. It has been discussed in Hyperallergic, Artnet, The LA Times, and The Guardian. She has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the US and abroad, including shows at Petzel Gallery in New York, Seyhoun Gallery in Tehran, Iran, and the Obama White House. Her most recent work, A Kind Word, explores collective healing and speculative gender-based equality in the United States. She is expected to receive her MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the spring of 2023.

Sam Giarratani
Producer and Co-founder

After years working as a public art coordinator for Hank Willis Thomas, Sam started the production management company Negative Space in response to the pandemic’s dramatic effects on the ways we interact and a growing need for more public art. Taken from a principle in drawing and design, Negative Space seeks to work in the space behind the scenes, helping artists and organizations who are socially-engaged to produce contemporary public artworks that strive to advance social justice. Negative Space offers project management with principles of inclusivity, empathy, transparency and accessibility. Negative Space serves artist clients Nekisha Durrett, Ann Lewis, Coby Kennedy, and Hank Willis Thomas, and has collaborated with Incarceration Nations Network, Pioneer Works, Mass Design Group, and municipalities and public art programs from across the country.

Passionate about collaborating with socially-engaged artists, architects, organizers, communities, and organizations, Negative Space helps them to produce contemporary and multidisciplinary public art that advances their social justice missions. We unite a spectrum of disciplines under principles of inclusivity, empathy, transparency, and accessibility.