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Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" (c. July 4, 1844 – September 17, 1907), was an American sculptor.
Born in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American (Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Her work is known for incorporating themes relating to Black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas into Neoclassical-style sculpture.
[[File:Hiawatha MET DP371840.jpg|thumb|''Hiawatha'', 1868, by Edmonia Lewis, inspired by [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]]'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." On official documents she variously gave 1842, 1844, and 1854 as her birth year. She was born near Albany, New York. Most of her girlhood was apparently spent in Newark, New Jersey.
Her mother, Catherine Mike Lewis, was African-Native American, of Mississaugas and African-American descent. 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, who was Afro-Haitian and worked as a valet (gentleman's servant). 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. Samuel was born in 1835 to his father of the same name, and his first wife, in Haiti. The family came to the United States when Samuel was a young child. Samuel became a barber at age 12 after their father died.
The children lived with their aunts near Niagara Falls, New York, for about four years. Lewis and her aunts sold Ojibwe baskets and other items, such as and embroidered blouses, to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Buffalo. During this time, Lewis went by her Native American name, Wildfire, while her brother was called Sunshine. In 1852, Samuel left for San Francisco, California, leaving Lewis in the care of a Captain S. R. Mills.
Samuel's endeavors in the California gold rush proved successful, and by the time Edmonia got to college, he "supplied her every want to anticipate her wishes after the style and manner of a person of ample income".
In 1856, Lewis enrolled in a pre-college program at New York Central College, a Baptist abolitionist school in McGrawville (now McGraw, New York). 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).
Mary said later that she was subject to daily racism and discrimination. She, and other female students, were rarely given the opportunity to participate in the classroom or speak at public meetings.
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.
The remainder of Lewis' time at Oberlin was marked by isolation and prejudice. About a year after the poisoning trial, Lewis was accused of stealing artists' materials from the college. She was acquitted due to lack of evidence. Only a few months later she was charged with aiding and abetting a burglary. At this point she had left. Another report says that she was forbidden from registering for her last term, leaving her unable to graduate.
Oberlin College awarded her a degree posthumously in 2022.
The Keeps wrote a letter of introduction on Lewis' behalf to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, as did Henry Highland Garnet. He introduced her to already established sculptors in the area, as well as writers who publicized Lewis in the abolitionist press. 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.
To instruct her, he lent her fragments of sculptures to copy in clay, which he critiqued. Under his tutelage, she crafted her own sculpting tools and sold her first piece, a sculpture of a woman's hand, for $8. 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 opened her studio to the public with her first solo exhibition in 1864.
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. When she met Union Colonel Shaw, the commander of an African-American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, she was inspired to create a bust of his likeness. It impressed the Shaw family, which purchased it. 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. Anna Quincy Waterston, a poet, then wrote a poem about Lewis and Shaw.
From 1864 to 1871, Lewis was written about or interviewed by Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, Anna Quincy Waterston, and Laura Curtis Bullard, all important women in Boston and New York abolitionist circles. Because of these women, articles about Lewis appeared in many important abolitionist journals, including Broken Fetter, the Christian Register, and the Independent. 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", and Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Lewis also drew inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his work, particularly his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. She made several busts of its leading characters, for whom he had drawn on Ojibwe legend.
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. She began sculpting in marble, working within the Neoclassicism manner, but focusing on naturalism within themes and images relating to black and American Indian people. 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.
Lewis was unique in the way she approached sculpting abroad. She insisted on enlarging her clay and wax models in marble herself, rather than hire native Italian sculptors to do it for her – the common practice at the time. Male sculptors were largely skeptical of the talent of female sculptors, and often accused them of not doing their own work. 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.
While in Rome, Lewis continued to express her African-American and Native American heritage. One of her more famous works, "Forever Free", depicted a powerful image of an African-American man and woman emerging from the bonds of slavery. Another sculpture Lewis created was called "The Arrow Maker", which showed a Native American father teaching his daughter how to make an arrow.
Her work sold for large sums of money. In 1873 an article in the New Orleans Picayune stated: "Edmonia Lewis had snared two 50,000-dollar commissions." Her new-found popularity made her studio a tourist destination.
In 1872, Edmonia was summoned to Peterboro, New York, to sculpt wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith, a project conceived by his friends. Smith was not pleased and what Lewis completed was a sculpture of the clasped hands of Gerrit and his beloved wife Ann.
After being placed in storage, the statue was moved to the 1878 Chicago Interstate Exposition, where it remained unsold. Then the sculpture was 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". The grave was in front of the grandstand of his Harlem race track in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, where the sculpture remained for nearly a century until the land was bought by the U.S. Postal Service and the sculpture was moved to a construction storage yard in Cicero, Illinois. While at the storage yard, The Death of Cleopatra sustained extensive damage at the hands of well-meaning Boy Scouts who painted and caused other damage to the sculpture. Dr. James Orland, a dentist in Forest Park and a member of the Forest Park Historical Society, acquired the sculpture and held it in private storage at the Forest Park Mall.
Later, Marilyn Richardson, an assistant professor in the erstwhile The Writing Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and later curator and scholar of African-American art, went searching for The Death of Cleopatra for her biography of Lewis. Richardson was directed to the Forest Park Historical Society and Dr. Orland by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had earlier been contacted by the historical society regarding the sculpture. Richardson, after confirming the sculpture's location, contacted African-American bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley, and the two gained the attention of NMAA's George Gurney. According to Gurney, Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the sculpture was in a race track in Forest Park, Illinois, during World War II. Finally, the sculpture came under the purview of the Forest Park Historical Society, which donated it to Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1994. Chicago-based Andrezej Dajnowski, in conjunction with the Smithsonian, spent $30,000 to restore it to its near-original state. The repairs were extensive, including the nose, sandals, hands, chin, and extensive "sugaring" (disintegration.)
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. In the art world, she became eclipsed by history, and lost fame. By 1901 she had moved to London.
The events of her later years are not known.
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.
In her 2007 work, Charmaine Nelson wrote of Lewis:
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.
==Gallery==
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. She received professional support from both Charlotte Cushman, a Boston actress and a pivotal figure for expatriate sculptors in Rome, and Maria Weston Chapman, a dedicated worker for the anti-slavery cause.
(1974). 9780448230351, Paddington Press. ISBN 9780448230351 Lewis had many major exhibitions during her rise to fame, including one in Chicago, Illinois, in 1870, and in Rome in 1871.
The Death of Cleopatra
A major coup in her career was participating in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. For this, she created a monumental 3,015-pound marble sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra, portraying the queen in the throes of death, which was her largest and most significant sculpture. This piece depicts the moment popularized by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra had allowed herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp following the loss of her crown. Of the piece, J. S. Ingraham wrote that Cleopatra VII 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:
Later career
A testament to Lewis's renown as an artist came in 1877, when former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant commissioned her to do his portrait. He sat for her as a model and was pleased with her finished piece. She also contributed a bust of Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner to the 1895 Atlanta Exposition.
Death
From 1896 to 1901 Lewis lived in Paris. She then relocated to the Hammersmith area of London, England, before her death on September 17, 1907, in the Hammersmith Borough Infirmary. According to her death certificate, the cause of her death was chronic kidney failure (Bright's disease). She is buried in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery, 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. Lewis had to balance her own personal identity with her artistic, social, and national identity, a tiring activity that affected her art.
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'
.
Forever Free (1867)
Forever Free is a sculpture Lewis created in 1867, commemorating the Abolitionism in the United States two years earlier and takes its title from President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The white marble sculpture shows a man standing, staring up, and raising his left arm into the air. Wrapped around his left wrist is a chain; however, this chain is not restraining him. To his right is a woman kneeling with her hands held in a position of prayer, the man's right hand gently placed on her right shoulder. The work differs from many other depictions of abolition from the period by showing the Black man standing and unshackled rather than bound or kneeling.
(2025). 9780813530222, Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9780813530222
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. Hagar is inspired by a character from the Old Testament, the handmaid or slave of Abraham's wife Sarah. Being unable to conceive a child, Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham, in order to bear him a son. Hagar gave birth to Abraham's firstborn son Ishmael, and after Sarah gave birth to her own son Isaac, she resented Hagar and made Abraham "cast her into the wilderness". The piece was made of white marble, and Hagar is standing as if about to walk on, with her hands clasped in prayer and staring slightly up but not straight across. Some scholars interpret Hagar as a metaphor for the struggles of African-American women, particularly in the context of slavery and exploitation.
The Death of Cleopatra (1876)
Discussed above.
In popular media
List of major works
Posthumous exhibitions
See also
Notes
Bibliography
(2025). 9780500204054, Thames and Hudson. ISBN 9780500204054
(2025). 9781588634511, Esquiline Hill Press. ISBN 9781588634511
(1993). 9780689318016, Maxwell Macmillan. ISBN 9780689318016
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1844 Births, 1907 Deaths, 19th-century American Sculptors, 20th-century American Artists, 20th-century African-american Artists, African-american Catholics, African-american Sculptors, Alumni Of Bedford College, London, American Expatriates In Italy, American Expatriates In The United Kingdom, American People Of Haitian Descent, American People Of Ojibwe Descent, Black Native American People, Burials At St Mary's Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, Native American Sculptors, Native American Women Artists, New York Central College Alumni, Oberlin College Alumni, People Acquitted Of Manslaughter, Sculptors From New York, 19th-century Native American Women Artists, 20th-century Native American Women Artists, 20th-century Native American Artists, 20th-century American Women Sculptors, 20th-century American Sculptors, 19th-century American Women Sculptors, 19th-century Native American Artists, 19th-century African-american Artists, 19th-century American Women Artists, Native American Women Sculptors, African-american Women Sculptors, Native American Roman Catholics, 20th-century African-american Women Artists
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