African American History: Sculptor Edmonia Lewis
February 14, 2017
World Book continues its celebration of Black History Month with a look at Edmonia Lewis, the first professional African American and Native American sculptor. In the years after the American Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1865-1877), Lewis overcame gender, racial, social, and economic barriers to become an internationally acclaimed artist. She worked in a Neoclassical style and was notable for incorporating themes relating to the black experience and Native American culture. Neoclassicists often use subjects from ancient history to make observations about contemporary events.
Mary Edmonia Lewis was born in 1844 in Greenbush (now Rensselaer), near Albany, New York, to a free African American father and a Chippewa mother. Orphaned as a child, Mary Edmonia and her older half-brother Samuel were adopted by her mother’s sisters and raised in a nomadic Native American community on the New York-Canadian border. Mary Edmonia was given the Native American name Wildfire.
Samuel Lewis became a gold miner in California and financed Wildfire’s early schooling. In 1859, at a time when slavery was still legal, he also helped his 15-year-old sister to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. While there, she asked to be called M. Edmonia Lewis. At Oberlin, Lewis was falsely accused of poisoning two white roommates. Days later, she was captured and beaten by a white mob. Although the charges against her were dropped, she had to endure a highly publicized trial. She was later accused of stealing art supplies at the college. Again, the case was dismissed. However, Oberlin would not allow Lewis to finish her final term and graduate.
In 1863, with Samuel’s help, Edmonia traveled to Boston, where she befriended the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. She also met the sculptor Edward A. Brackett, who taught her sculpture and helped her set up her own studio. In 1864, Lewis created busts of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a Civil War hero who had died leading the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and the abolitionist John Brown. With the money she earned from sales of the busts, she traveled to London, Paris, and Florence, before settling in Rome, where she continued her work as a sculptor.
One of Lewis’s most acclaimed works is Forever Free (1867). Commemorating the 1865 abolition of slavery in the United States, the sculpture depicts a black man and woman emerging from the bonds of slavery. Lewis embraced her Native American heritage with works inspired by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), about the great Native American leader Hiawatha.
Lewis also carved busts of American presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, as well as sculptures of mythic, Biblical, and historical scenes. In 1876, she created a sensation at the International Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with The Death of Cleopatra (1876). Her two-ton marble sculpture depicts the Egyptian queen in the throes of death. Lewis was the only artist of color invited to exhibit at the exposition.
Lewis continued to exhibit her work until the 1890’s. Little is known about her later years. Some sources say she died in London in 1907; others say she was still living in Rome in 1911. However, in recent decades, Lewis’s life and work have been reexamined and lauded. Her sculptures are now part of the Howard University Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.