First Internationally Acclaimed African American Sculptor

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About Edmonia Lewis, American Hero

Edmonia Lewis has inspired generations of minority artists for over 130 years, even as the mainstream art world resisted recognizing the achievements of women and African Americans. She boldly breached barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, and class around the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction, an era when prejudices against these minorities were particularly virulent.

She demonstrated her talent to Boston society by making likenesses of abolitionist heroes and local luminaries. After her bust of martyred Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was widely celebrated, she sold 100 plaster copies. 

Her desire to learn drove her to Europe while in her mid-twenties. There, she thrived among the first group of female artists, described by Henry James as a "strange sisterhood" and a "white marmorean flock." Rome offered an environment largely unspoiled by the North American culture based on slavery and Puritanism. Soon a visit to her studio was a must for tourists and she achieved commercial success. 

She became the first African American sculptor to celebrate Emancipation with The Freed Woman and Her Child and the immortal Forever Free.  She created figures from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, popular cherubs, copies of classics, and religious works that readily sold. She created a celebrated bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also sculpting Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, John Brown, Senator Charles Sumner, Bishop B. W. Arnett,  John Cardinal McCloskey, and many others. 

She loved America, but she could not live in a society that cast her unfairly. Slighted by a few Americans even in Rome, she plotted her victorious return to the United States. Advertising Hagar in the Chicago Tribune, Lewis became the first African-American artist to link her race and name with artistic achievement. She shocked and mortified those who claimed African Americans lacked the capacity for intelligence and fine art by standing next to her works and explaining them for days on end. She was the first important female sculptor to take her work to California. At the 1876 Centennial exposition, she stunned the art world with her sensational Death of Cleopatra, assuring her right to a place in history. 

Edmonia Lewis was endowed not only with special gifts as an artist. Her shrewdness, creativity, perseverance, and passion enabled her to find support against all odds and ever press her case. She kept many secrets, such as the shocking events of her coming of age, the true meaning of her Chippewa name (which she claimed was "Wild Fire"), and her age. She created many of the myths that amazed, tantalized, and generated interest in her work. Inevitably, she found mentors who would betray, oppose, or otherwise disappoint her. Only one could be counted upon – but when needed he would be many miles away. Retiring to Paris, she eventually abandoned the society – friends as well as enemies – that had sought to keep her down.

Edmonia Lewis left a lifelong trail of dramas and burned bridges from Oberlin to London on her mission to do something for her people. Her legacy is enormous. Her name is a shibboleth that bonds cultural minorities in the arts. Her works are landmarks in the history of America, monuments to a heroic spirit and chaotic times. Some are considered iconic, some demonstrate excellence in the difficult style of the time, some test the limits of neoclassicism, some express her faith, some fed her need for cash flow, and some give us three-dimensional portraits of great men. Many are lost or have yet to emerge from private collections. They are taught in college classes and sought by fabulous collectors. They are treasured by institutions like Harvard, Howard, and Oberlin universities, San Jose public library, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark and other museums. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, they fill an entire room.

Her success spurred generations of artists and expanded the horizons of black feminists. She was first to celebrate her racial identity. Henry Ossawa Tanner and others followed her to Europe seeking to learn from masters and to create works of universal appeal in a positive environment. Barbara Chase-Riboud, an artist who has lived in Paris since 1961, called Edmonia Lewis her favorite and pointed to her life as predictive of other black artists’ experience. Feminist critic bell hooks called Edmonia Lewis “an inspiration for me … as she grappled with an insensitive white environment that was not able to fully respect her artistic ambitions or her desire to remain in touch with the Chippewa world of her mother and the African American world of her father.”

In spite of years of being discounted by art educators as female and colored, the spirit of Edmonia Lewis lives on.