Edmonia Lewis

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Edmonia Lewis was an American sculptor.

She was the first person of color

to achieve international

fame as an

artist.

Intro

Lewis was both African-American and Native-American.

Her artwork is famous for showing American people of color in the Neo-Classical style.

Showing Her Heritage Through Art

Neo-Classicism was an 18th century art movement that drew inspiration from Classical Antiquity.

Neo-Classicism

Classical Antiquity began in Ancient Greece and Rome about 3000 years ago. Ancient artists idealized specific standards of beauty that they described as “harmonious, proportional, and rational.”

Everything we know about Edmonia Lewis’s life must be taken with a grain of salt.

As a black woman competing for a living during the American Civil War, Lewis altered her life story as needed to earn press and win commissions.

Here are a few things that we think we know about her:

Unreliable

Biography

Wildfire

Wildfire Lewis was born in 1844.

She was orphaned at a young age. She was raised by her aunts in Niagara Falls, New York. They made a living selling crafts to tourists.

According to the artist: “Until I was twelve years old, I led this wandering life, fishing and swimming… and making moccasins. I was sent to school for three year, but was declared to be wild. They could nothing with me.”

According to her academic records though, her grades, “conduct,” and attendance were all exemplary.

Lewis studied art at Oberlin College where she changed her name to Mary Edmonia Lewis.

Lewis was one of few students of color at Oberlin. While there, she suffered the horrific racism of her classmates. She was kidnapped and beaten by a white mob. They accused her of crimes she didn't commit including theft and poisoning! Lewis was found innocent each time.

Eventually of course, Lewis “had had enough, and left.”

Lewis moved to Boston. Thanks to support from prominent abolitionists, she found a teacher who specialized in sculpting marble.

One of Few Black Students

Lewis's first successes came from the sale of small clay and marble medallions like the one seen here.

For $15 each, she sold one hundred copies of a bust of Civil War Colonel Robert Shaw. She created it to honor the white officer who died alongside his African-American infantrymen.

From those sales, she raised enough money to move to Europe.

First Sales

“I was practically driven to Rome,” Lewis said, “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 Rome, Lewis sculpted “Forever Free,” an image of an African-American man and woman breaking the bonds of slavery.

Fun Fact: Sculptors of that time usually paid stone crafters to translate their clay sculptures into marble. This raises historical questions about who the true artists of that time were: the original sculptors or the stone crafters? Lewis insisted on chiseling her sculptures herself.

Forever Free

Fame

In 1873, Edmonia Lewis earned two $50,000 commissions, the equivalent of $2 million today. Newspaper reports about the purchases made Lewis’s studio a tourist destination. Her rise to fame included major exhibitions in Chicago and in Rome.

This history of Edmonia Lewis's masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra, explains why so few of her pieces still exist:

The Death of Cleopatra took four years for Lewis to complete. She paid a small fortune to have it shipped to the United States for a Centennial Exhibition. “People were blown away by it.”

The Death of Cleopatra moved through owners from the exhibition to an interstate exposition to a saloon to a racetrack where it served as a gravestone for a horse.

Then the landscape changed around the statue. The racetrack became a golf course which became a storage site for military weapons which eventually became a mail center for the US postal service. All that time, the sculpture was damaged by mistreatment and bad weather.

In the 1980s, the post office gave The Death of Cleopatra to a historical society that donated the piece to the Smithsonian Museum. There it was lovingly returned to its original form.

Few of Lewis's sculptures were so lucky!

The Death of Cleopatra

Neoclassicism fell out of fashion in the 1880s.

Lewis - unprotected by the art world's favoritism towards

white, male artists - drifted

into obscurity.

She died in London,

England in 1907.

Obscurity

In 2022, more than a century after her death, Oberlin College awarded Edmonia Lewis her degree.

Also in 2022, the U.S. Postal Service issued a postage stamp to honor Edmonia Lewis. The description reads, “As the first African American and Native American sculpture to earn international recognition, Lewis challenged social barriers and assumptions about artists in the 19th century.”

Remembered at Last