Edmonia Lewis, Albumen print, c.1870
By Henry Rocher
Copyright of Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia
Artist
Best known for her sculptures of African, African American, and American Indian figures and subject matter, Lewis was widely considered the first African-American woman sculptor to achieve national and international critical acclaim.
Early Life
Mary Edmonia Lewis was born July 21, 1845, in Greenbush, New York. Her father was an African American (possibly Haitian) fugitive slave, and her mother was a Mississauga Ojibwe. She had an older brother, Samuel. Lewis’s mother was a traditional weaver skilled in Native American crafts, skills that she passed down to her daughter. At around the age of nine, Lewis lost both of her parents. She and her brother were raised by her mother’s sisters in the area around Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York. As a child, she hunted, fished, and sold Native American crafts. Her brother attended boarding school for a time and is said to have taken part in the California gold rush. He returned from California with some wealth, which he used to pay Lewis’s tuition at New York Central College. She was dismissed from the school for wildness, however, and moved to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1859.
Lewis’s first two years at Oberlin were unremarkable except for a course in linear drawing that constituted her first formal art training. In 1862, she was accused of poisoning two of her roommates. The case caused a minor sensation and led to Lewis being physically assaulted (the incident was never investigated). She was arrested and formally charged with poisoning her classmates, but she was exonerated. Lewis was later charged with minor thefts, but she was exonerated again. In her final term at Oberlin, her application for registration was not accepted.
Life’s Work
Lewis left Oberlin frustrated but determined to pursue a career in art. She had a letter of recommendation from famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to study sculpture with Edward A. Brackett. Brackett tutored Lewis and allowed her to use his famous bust of the abolitionist John Brown as a model. She later sold small plaster relief medallions of John Brown and Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Her sculpture and sales were successful enough that in 1864, possibly with her brother’s financial assistance, Lewis was able to start her own studio in Boston. Her sales and commissions for marble busts of Shaw and temperance leader Dr. Dioclesian Lewis earned her the money to travel to Florence, Italy, in 1865.
In Florence, Lewis met Hiram Powers and Thomas Ball. The two sculptors introduced her to the American Neoclassical style that characterized much of her later work. After some months in Florence, Lewis moved to Rome in the beginning of 1866. There, she became part of an influential group of American female artists. From 1866 to 1870, Lewis created some of her most famous sculptures, including depictions of Anna Quincy Waterston, Mary and Jesus, Hiawatha, Minnehaha, Hagar, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She created her most famous sculpture, Forever Free, in 1867-1868 to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. On August 20, 1870, Lewis’s Hagar (1868) was exhibited in Chicago’s Farewell Hall. In 1871, she traveled to Boston for the presentation of Forever Free.
Between 1871 and 1877, Lewis created a number of other sculptures with subjects such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Moses, and the Greek goddess Hygieia. She also made the pieces Cupid Caught, The Wedding of Hiawatha, Awake, Asleep, and The Old Arrow-maker and His Daughter. In 1875, she produced a two-ton, life-size sculpture titled The Death of Cleopatra, which gained critical acclaim at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and a show in Chicago (the statue was stored and forgotten until the 1970’s, when it was rediscovered and restored; it was donated to the Smithsonian in 1994). Lewis’s last known commission was an 1883 sculpture of the baby Jesus and the three wise men for a Baltimore church; the work was lost. In 2007, a forty-eight-inch sculpture titled The Veiled Bride of Spring, dated 1879, was discovered and attributed to Lewis.
While The Veiled Bride of Spring is Lewis’s latest surviving sculpture, there is a record of her working as late as 1887, when Frederick Douglass’s diary reports that he visited her studio in Rome. Little is known about Lewis from this time until her death. U.S. Embassy records show that she was alive in 1909, but the year and place of her death are unknown.
Significance
Lewis is considered the first African-American female sculptor to gain international prominence. Her work, although widely acclaimed, also was sometimes criticized for its neoclassical style. Her choice of subjects reflected her American Indian ancestry and abolitionist beliefs and represented women as strong and regal despite their oppression.
Bibliography
Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African American Artists from 1972 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Includes a chapter on Lewis that critically examines her life and work. Contains useful photos, including pictures of works that have been lost.
Bontemps, Arna Alexander, and Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps. “African American Women Artists: An Historical Perspective.” In Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, edited by Jacqueline Bobo. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Important critical analysis of Lewis’s work, focusing on her racial identity and how it is expressed in her subject matter.
Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. This book is the most exhaustive analysis of Lewis and her sculpture to date. It both challenges and draws upon traditional racial and gender analyses of Lewis’s work and life.
Wolfe, Rinna Evelyn. Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble. Parsippany, N.J.: Dillon Press, 1998. The first book dedicated to the work of Lewis, offering details of her life and a list of her known sculptures.
Minnehaha, marble, 1868, collection of the Newark Museum
