Edmonia Lewis

Early life 's 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha. According to the American National Biography, reliable information about her early life is limited, and Lewis "was often inconsistent in interviews even with basic facts about her origins, preferring to present herself as the exotic product of a childhood spent roaming the forests with her mother's people." She was an excellent weaver and craftswoman. Two different African-American men are mentioned in different sources as being her father. The first is Samuel Lewis, Other sources say her father was the writer on African Americans, Robert Benjamin Lewis. Her half-brother Samuel, who is treated at some length in a history of Montana, said that their father was "a West Indian Frenchman", and his mother "part African and partly a descendant of the educated Narragansett Indians of New York state." (The Narragansett people are originally from Rhode Island.) By the time Lewis reached the age of nine, both of her parents had died; Catherine Lewis died in 1847 and Robert Benjamin Lewis in 1853. Her two maternal aunts adopted her and her older half-brother Samuel. There Lewis met many of the leading activists who would become mentors, patrons, and possible subjects for her work as her artistic career developed. In a later interview, Lewis said that she left the school after three years, having been "declared to be wild." However, her academic record at Central College (1856–fall 1858) shows that her grades, "conduct", and attendance were all exemplary. Her classes included Latin, French, "grammar", arithmetic, drawing, composition, and declamation (public speaking). before entering Oberlin Collegiate Institute (since 1866, Oberlin College), one of the first U.S. higher-learning institutions to admit women and people of differing ethnicities. The Ladies' Department was designed "to give Young Ladies facilities for the thorough mental discipline, and the special training which will qualify them for teaching and other duties of their sphere." She changed her name to Mary Edmonia Lewis and began to study art. Lewis boarded with Reverend John Keep and his wife from 1859 until she was forced from the college in 1863. At Oberlin, with a student population of one thousand, Lewis was one of only 30 students of color. During the winter of 1862, several months after the start of the US Civil War, an incident occurred between Lewis and two Oberlin classmates, Maria Miles and Christina Ennes. The three women, all boarding in Keep's home, planned to go sleigh riding with some young men later that day. Before the sleighing, Lewis served her friends a drink of spiced wine. Shortly after, Miles and Ennes fell severely ill. Doctors examined them and concluded that the two women had some sort of poison in their system, supposedly cantharides, a reputed aphrodisiac. For a time it was not certain that they would survive. Days later, it became apparent that the two women would recover from the incident. Authorities initially took no action. News of the controversial incident spread rapidly throughout Ohio and was universally known in the town of Oberlin, where the general population was not as progressive as that of the college. While Lewis was walking home alone one night she was dragged into an open field by unknown assailants, badly beaten, and left for dead. After the attack, local authorities arrested Lewis, charging her with poisoning her friends. John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin College alumnus and the first African-American lawyer in Ohio, represented Lewis during her trial. Although most witnesses spoke against her and she did not testify, Chapman moved successfully to have the charges dismissed: the contents of the victims' stomachs had not been analyzed and there was, therefore, no evidence of poisoning, no corpus delicti. Oberlin College awarded her a degree posthumously in 2022. ==Art career==

Boston '', marble, 1868, collection of the Newark Museum After college, Lewis moved to Boston in early 1864, where she began to pursue her career as a sculptor. She repeatedly told a story about encountering in Boston a statue of Benjamin Franklin, not knowing what it was or what to call it, but concluding she could make a "stone man" herself. Finding an instructor, however, was not easy for her. Three male sculptors refused to instruct her before she was introduced to the moderately successful sculptor, Edward Augustus Brackett (1818–1908), who specialized in marble portrait busts. His clients were some of the most important abolitionists of the day, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and John Brown. Anne Whitney, a fellow sculptor and friend of Lewis', wrote in an 1864 letter to her sister that Lewis's relationship with her instructor did not end amicably, but did not disclose the reason. Lewis was inspired by the lives of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. Her subjects in 1863 and 1864 included some of the most famous abolitionists of her day: John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Lewis then made plaster-cast reproductions of the bust and sold one hundred of these copies at 15 dollars apiece. It was her most famous work to date and the money she earned from the busts allowed her to move to Rome. Lewis was aware of her reception in Boston. She was not opposed to the coverage she received in the abolitionist press, and she was not known to turn down financial assistance, but she could not tolerate false praise. She knew that some did not really appreciate her art, but saw her as an opportunity to demonstrate their support for human rights. Early works that proved highly popular included medallion portraits of the abolitionists John Brown, described as "her hero", Rome The success and popularity of the works she created in Boston (particularly the reproductions of her bust of Shaw) allowed Lewis to bear the cost of a trip to Rome in 1866. On her 1865 passport is written, "M. Edmonia Lewis is a Black girl sent by subscription to Italy having displayed great talents as a sculptor". The established sculptor Hiram Powers gave her space to work in his studio. She entered a circle of expatriate artists and established her own space within the former studio of 18th-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, just off the Piazza Barberini. Lewis spent most of her adult career in Rome, where Italy's less pronounced racism allowed increased opportunity to a black artist. There Lewis enjoyed more social, spiritual, and artistic freedom than she had had in the United States. She was Catholic and Rome allowed her both spiritual and physical closeness to her faith. In America, Lewis would have had to continue relying on abolitionist patronage; but Italy allowed her to make her own in the international art world. The surroundings of the classical world greatly inspired her and influenced her work, in which she recreated the classical art style—such as presenting people in her sculptures as draped in robes rather than in contemporary clothing. {{blockquote|She wears a red cap in her studio, which is very picturesque and effective; her face is a bright, intelligent, and expressive one. Her manners are child-like, simple and most winning and pleasing.... There is something in human nature...which makes everyone admire a brave and heroic spirit; and if people are not always ready to lend a helping hand to struggling genius, they are all eager to applaud when those struggles are crowned with success. The hour of applause has come to Edmonia Lewis. Harriet Hosmer, a fellow sculptor and expatriate, also did this. Lewis also was known to make sculptures before receiving commissions for them, or sent unsolicited works to Boston patrons requesting that they raise funds for materials and shipping. Lewis had many major exhibitions during her rise to fame, including one in Chicago, Illinois, in 1870, and in Rome in 1871. She also contributed a bust of Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner to the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. In the late 1880s, neoclassicism declined in popularity, as did the popularity of Lewis's artwork. She continued sculpting in marble, increasingly creating altarpieces and other works for Catholic patrons. A bust of Christ, created in her Rome studio in 1870, was rediscovered in Scotland in 2015. The events of her later years are not known. ==Death==

, London From 1896 to 1901 Lewis lived in Paris. According to her death certificate, the cause of her death was chronic kidney failure (Bright's disease). There were earlier theories that Lewis died in Rome in 1907 or, alternatively, that she had died in Marin County, California, and was buried in an unmarked grave in San Francisco. In 2017, a GoFundMe by East Greenbush, New York, town historian Bobbie Reno was successful, and Edmonia Lewis's grave was restored. The work was done by the E M Lander Co. in London. ==Reception==

As a black artist, Edmonia Lewis had to be conscious of her stylistic choices, as her largely white audience often gravely misread her work as self-portraiture. In order to avoid this, her female figures typically possess European features. In her 2007 work, Charmaine Nelson wrote of Lewis: ==Personal life==

Lewis never married and had no known children. According to her biographer, Dr. Marilyn Richardson, there is no definite information about her romantic involvement with anyone. However, in 1873 her engagement was announced, and in 1875, her fiancé's skin color was revealed to be the same as hers, although his name is not given. There is no further reference to this engagement. ==Popular works==

Old Arrow-Maker and his Daughter (1866) This sculpture was inspired by Lewis's Native American heritage. An arrow-maker and his daughter sit on a round base, dressed in traditional Native American clothes. The male figure has recognizable Native American facial features, but not the daughter. As white audiences misread her work as self-portraiture, she often removed all facial features associated with "colored" races in female portrayal. This statue later came to be known as The Wooing of Hiawatha, since it appears to depict a scene from Longfellow's epic poem where Minnehaha and her father are approached by Hiawatha. This interesting perspective of the scene (not of a third-person view of everyone, but rather a first-person view from Hiawatha's perspective) is particularly notable because it seems to come from Lewis's first-person insight into the character of a Native American and thus invites viewers to share this perspective. This piece is in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art https://learn.ncartmuseum.org/artwork/old-indian-arrowmaker-and-his-daughter/ . Scholars have frequently puzzled over Lewis's decision to Europeanize the features of the female figure. At least one scholar has suggested that the choice may have been an acknowledgment of the varied appearance and heritage of African Americans such as Lewis herself, who was of both African and Native American descent. This piece is held by Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Hagar (1875) Lewis had a tendency to sculpt historically strong women, as demonstrated not just in Hagar but also in Lewis's Cleopatra piece. Lewis also depicted ordinary women in extreme situations, emphasizing their strength. Of the piece, J. S. Ingraham wrote that Cleopatra was "the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section" of the Exposition. Much of the viewing public was shocked by Lewis's frank portrayal of death, but the statue drew thousands of viewers nonetheless. Cleopatra was considered a woman of both sensuous beauty and demonic power, and her self-annihilation has been repeatedly portrayed in art, literature and cinema. In Death of Cleopatra, Edmonia Lewis added an innovative flair by portraying the Egyptian queen in a disheveled, inelegant manner, a departure from the refined, composed Victorian approach to representing death. Considering Lewis's interest in emancipation imagery as seen in her work Forever Free, it is not surprising that Lewis eliminated Cleopatra's usual companion figures of loyal slaves from her work. Lewis's The Death of Cleopatra may have been a response to the culture of the Centennial Exposition, which celebrated one hundred years of the United States being built around the principles of liberty and freedom, a celebration of unity despite centuries of slavery, the recent Civil War, and the failing attempts and efforts of Reconstruction. To avoid any acknowledgment of black empowerment by the Centennial, Lewis's sculpture could not have directly addressed the subject of Emancipation. Although her white contemporaries were also sculpting Cleopatra and other comparable subject matter (such as Harriet Hosmer's Zenobia), Lewis was more prone to scrutiny on the premise of race and gender since she, like Cleopatra, was female: After being placed in storage, the statue was moved to the 1878 Chicago Interstate Exposition. It was later acquired by a gambler by the name of "Blind John" Condon, who purchased it from a saloon on Clark Street to mark the grave of a racehorse named "Cleopatra"{{cite web |title=Edmonia Lewis |url=http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Edmonia_Lewis.aspx ==In popular media==

• Namesake of the Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People at Oberlin College. • Written about in Olio, which is a book of poetry written by Tyehimba Jess that was released in 2016. That book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. • Honored with a Google Doodle on February 1, 2017. • Stone Mirrors: The Sculpture and Silence of Edmonia Lewis, by Jeannine Atkins (2017), is a juvenile biographical novel in verse. • A belated obituary was published in The New York Times in 2018 as part of their Overlooked series. • Lewis is the subject of a stage play entitled "Edmonia" by Barry M. Putt Jr., presented by Beacon Theatre Productions in Philadelphia, PA in 2021. "Edmonia" stage play. • Lewis had a U.S. postal stamp unveiled in her honor on January 26, 2022. ==List of major works==

• John Brown medallions, 1864–65 • Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (plaster), 1864 • Anne Quincy Waterston, 1866 • A Freed Woman and Her Child, 1866 • The Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter, 1866 • The Marriage of Hiawatha, 1866–67 • Forever Free, 1867 • Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (marble), 1867–68 • Hagar in the Wilderness, 1868 • Madonna Holding the Christ Child, 1869 • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1869–71 • Bust of Abraham Lincoln, 187022, • Asleep, 1872 • Awake, 1872 • Poor Cupid, 1873 • Moses, 1873 • Bust of James Peck Thomas, 1874, collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, her only known portrait of a freed slave • Hygieia, 1874 • Hagar, 1875 • The Death of Cleopatra, marble, 1876, collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum • John Brown, 1876, Rome, plaster bust • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1876, Rome, plaster bust • General Ulysses S. Grant, 1877–78 • Veiled Bride of Spring, 1878 • John Brown, 1878–79 • The Adoration of the Magi, 1883 • Charles Sumner, 1895 ==Gallery==

File:Anna Quincy Waterston by Edmonia Lewis.jpg|Edmonia Lewis, Anna Quincy Waterston, 1866, photo by David Finn, ©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC File:Poor Cupid by Edmonia Lewis.jpg|Edmonia Lewis, Poor Cupid, 1872–1876, photo by David Finn, ©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC File:Young Octavian by Edmonia Lewis.jpg|Edmonia Lewis, Young Octavian, 1873, photo by David Finn, ©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC File:Hagar by Edmonia Lewis.jpg|Edmonia Lewis, Hagar, 1875, photo by David Finn, ©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC File:Old Arrow Maker by Edmonia Lewis.jpg|Edmonia Lewis, Old Arrow Maker, 1866–1872, photo by David Finn, ©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC ==Posthumous exhibitions==

• Art of the American Negro Exhibition, American Negro Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1940. • Howard University, Washington, D.C., 1967. • "The White, Marmorean Flock": Nineteenth-Century Women Neoclassical Sculptors," Vassar College, New York, 1972. • Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, 2008. • Edmonia Lewis and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Images and Identities at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 18 –May 3, 1995. • Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., June 7, 1996 – April 14, 1997. • Wildfire Test Pit, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, August 30, 2016 – June 12, 2017. • Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, (2019), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. • ''Edmonia Lewis's Bust of Christ'', Mount Stuart, UK • Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, February 14 – June 7, 2026, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia, August 8, 2026 – January 3, 2027, and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, April 3 – July 11, 2027. ==See also==