Edmonia Lewis is considered the first professional BIPOC sculptor in the United Statesand the first to achieve international acclaim.Even thoughmuch of her work has not survived into the 21stcentury,Lewis used her art to depict the stories of women and Indigenous people with reverence and beauty.Shattering gender and racial expectations in the 19th-century U.S., her life storyis a testament to the ability to succeed despite adversity.
Details and stories of Lewis’s life remain fuzzy.Lewis was known to tailor stories of her life towin overthe audience she was addressing, meaning stories she told would change or disappear over time. Scholars have noted thatshe used both fact and fiction to “embroider” her life story, particularly after she became internationally known.What we do know is that Lewis was an African American woman in a field dominated by white men and,despite the odds, she succeeded.
Mary Edmonia Lewis was bornin 1844 in either Ohio or near Albany, New York. Her father, who worked as a gentleman’s servant, was West Indian and living as a free person of color in the United States. Her mother, who was part Chippewa, was an artist in her own right and made moccasinsand other trinkets to sell to tourists.Lewis sometimes traced her desire to become an artistto her mother.Orphaned at agefive, Lewiswent to live with her auntsnearNiagra Falls, New York. She was given a robust education, financed and supported mostly by her older,half-brother, Samuel, who hadfound financial success. According to biographers, she was educated by an order of African American nuns in Baltimore and at a coeducational school in upstate New York before matriculating to Oberlin College in Ohio.
Oberlin College, founded in1833,was an early proponent of coeducation, abolitionism, and integration. While at Oberlin, Lewis boardedwithwhiteabolitionist and school trustee, John Keep. YetOberlin’s mission statement did not mean Lewis was free from racial attacks. During her time at Oberlin, Lewis was accused of attempting to poison her fellow classmate and roommate. While she was declared innocent after a trial, the abuse continued.Amob of whitemen kidnapped, beat, and left her to die in a field in the winter of 1862 becauseof the poisoning charge.She survived the attack, but was then accused of stealing art supplies from the school. Lewis leftOberlinbefore she could graduate; it is unclear if she wasexpelledor leftof her own accord.
With the encouragement and financial support of her brother Samuel,Lewis went toBoston in order to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. She met portrait sculptor Edward Brackett and beganher studies under his tutelage. With minimum training, she began to produce portrait medallion—small,generally circular, single-sided portrait medals—of well-known abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips.She also produced sculptural busts of John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. This early work wasfinancially successful, and Lewis earned enough money to finance her first trip to Europe in 1865.
Lewis settled in Rome where she joined a growing community of American artists living abroad.She told theNew York Timesin 1878, she was, “practically driven to Rome, in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color.The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”In her rented studio on the Piazza Barberini, Lewis designed,produced, and finished numerous sculptures.While most sculptors working in Rome at the time hired Italian workmen to create the final marble product, Lewiswas unique in that she did the entire processherself.Her studio in Rome became a “must-see” for Americans taking their European Tours,andshe continued to create busts of famous Americans, including Abraham Lincoln andUlysses S.Grant, who supposedly sat for his sculpture.Shealsocreated her largest and most powerful work, TheDeath of Cleopatra. The sculpture, depicting the last moments of Egyptian QueenCleopatra’s life, tookfour years for Lewis to complete and ended up weighing 3,000 pounds. In 1876, she shipped the sculpture across the Atlantic to Philadelphia so it could be considered for display in the Centennial Exhibition.The committee decided to include it in the hall set aside for American artists; the sculpture created a stirfor its realism andsince it depicted Cleopatra topless, which many male critics thought was inappropriate.
Beyond her statue of Cleopatra, Lewis created numerousworks depicting her dual African American and Native American ancestry. She became known for depicting “ethnic and humanitarian subject matter,” including a sculptureofHagar, the Egyptian maidservant to Abraham’s wifeSarah described in the Bible.Another of her more famous works was inspired by the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem,“The Song of Hiawatha.” The poem,published in 1885, was an epic that featured Native American characters. Lewis created at least three figure group sculptures inspired by thepoem; each depicted Native Americans and their civilizations respectfully.
Much is not known about the end of Lewis’s life. She disappeared from the publiceyein the 1880s.It is not known if she ever married or had children. Only recently hasLewis’sbiographer,MarilynRichardson, foundthat Lewis died in London on September 17, 1907 of Bright’s Disease.
Lewis’s work can now be found in some of the most important and famous American museums, including the Howard University Gallery of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,the Smithsonian American Art Museum,and the Baltimore Museum of Art.More than a century after itsinitialdisplay at the Centennial, Lewis’sDeath of Cleopatrawas found covered in graffiti and paint inForest Park, a Chicago suburb. It was donated to the Smithsonian in the early 1990s and now welcomes visitors to the museum’s third floor galleries. After a successful initiative to further recognize Lewis and her legacy, the U.S. Postal Service featured Lewis on a stamp in 2022 and Oberlin College awarded Lewis a "posthumous diploma of the Ladies’ Course" in 2022.
Written 2021
Updated 2024
