This is
another person I found on Pinterest.
Edmonia Lewis’s caption reads “Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. July 4, 1845 -
ca. 1911) was the first African American and Native American woman to gain fame
and recognition as a sculptor in the international fine arts world. She was of African American, Haitian, and
Ojibwe descent” (1). If that doesn’t
sound interesting, I don’t know what does.
When I started reading about her, she’s even more interesting, but with
some said parts to her story as well.
It’s not
entirely clear where or when Mary Edmonia Lewis was born. She claimed July 4, 1844 for her
birthdate. She could have been born any
time between 1840 and 1845 though. She
was probably born around Greenbush, New York (now in either Rensselaer or East
Greenbush). It’s also possible she was
born in Albany, New York or Newark, New Jersey.
In one interview she said she was born in Greenhigh, Ohio. July 4, 1844 in Greenbush, New York seems to
be the agreed upon date and place.
Edmonia was
the daughter of an African-American gentleman’s servant and a Mississauga
Ojibwe/African-American weaver and craftswoman.
Both of her parents died when she was young. Her mother’s two sisters took in Edmonia and
her brother Samuel (who was about twelve years older than Edmonia). At this point Edmonia was known as Wildfire,
and Samuel went by Sunshine. Edmonia
lived with her aunts for about four years in the area near Niagara Falls. She helped sell Ojibwe baskets and other
souvenirs to the tourists that came to Niagara Falls.
In 1852,
Samuel went to California to look for gold.
He must have been fairly successful because he was able to send money
back to Edmonia for a number of years.
Samuel helped pay for Edmonia’s education at the New York Central
College in McGrawville. This school was
a Baptist, abolitionist school. Edmonia
started at NYCC in 1856 but left after just three years “when she was ‘declared
to be wild’” (2).
In 1859
Edmonia started at Oberlin College with help from her brother and some
abolitionists. Oberlin was one of the first
schools to admit women and minority students.
At Oberlin, Edmonia began studying art, excelling at drawing. It was around this time that Wildfire chose
to be called Mary Edmonia Lewis; a few years later she would drop Mary and just
be Edmonia Lewis.
At Oberlin,
Edmonia boarded with the Reverend John Keep and his wife. Keep was an abolitionist and an advocate for
coeducation. Keep was also a member of
Oberlin’s Board of Trustees. At the Keep
residence also lived two white students, Christine Ennes and Maria Miles.
In the
winter of 1862, Edmonia, Christine, and Maria were going out for a sleigh ride
and had some spiced wine. Edmonia didn’t
have as much as the other girls and the other girls got very sick. It was discovered that they had been poisoned
with Spanish Fly. They were very sick
for a while, but recovered. It was
believed that Edmonia had poisoned them, but since they recovered, no charges
were filed. People in town were very
upset by this though, and Edmonia was dragged off to a field and beaten. Due to public pressure, she was charged with poisoning
Christine and Maria.
Oberlin
defended Edmonia. Her lawyer, John
Mercer Langston, was shot by one of the sick girls’ fathers. In court, Langston argued that “the contents
of the girls’ stomachs had never been analyzed, and thus the charges against
Lewis could not be proved” (3).
Witnesses testified against Edmonia, and she didn’t take the stand. She was either acquitted or the case was
dismissed, and so she was free to go.
(Langston “would go on to become the first African-American elected to public
office in the United States and a founding dean of Howard Law School” (4).)
The following
year Edmonia was accused of stealing art supplies from Oberlin, but was acquitted
of this charge as well. The women’s
principal would not allow Edmonia to register for classes for her last term,
though, and so she never graduated.
After
leaving Oberlin, Edmonia debated returning to the Niagara Falls area and her
mother’s tribe, but instead went to Boston.
The Keeps’ wrote to friends in Boston, introducing her to William Lloyd
Garrison. Garrison introduced Edmonia to
area sculptors and writers. She tried at
least three people before she found a teacher willing to take her on in Edward
A Brackett. Brackett specialized in
marble busts and had abolitionists for clients.
He lent Edmonia fragments of his pieces for her to copy and be
critiqued. It’s not clear what happened,
but Brackett and Edmonia split and it was unamicable.
In 1864,
after a solo exhibition, Edmonia opened her own studio. Her pieces at this time were mostly of
abolitionists. Her 1863 and 1864
subjects included John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw’s family purchased her bust of him, and
the success of that allowed her to make plaster copies and sell them for $115
each. She also made medallion portraits
of Brown and Garrison.
Between
1864 and 1871, Edmonia was written about by a number of prominent Boston and
New York abolitionists. While she wasn’t
opposed to the coverage she was getting, Edmonia didn’t want false praise. “She knew that some did not really appreciate
her art, but saw her as an opportunity to express and show their support for
human rights” (5).
Due to the
success of her bust of Shaw, and the medallions of abolitionists, Edmonia was
able to save up enough to travel to Rome in 1866. In Rome, the sculptor Hiram Powers gave her
some room in his studio. She also was
supported by Charlotte Cushman, a Boston actress, and Maria Weston Chapman, an
anti-slavery advocate.
In Rome,
Edmonia first began sculpting in marble.
She also started pieces about Emancipation, the first of which was Freedwoman and her Child. She used the neoclassical forms and mediums
to create pieces related to blacks and Native Americans. Edmonia was profiled in London in Atheneum and Art-Journal. In 1868, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow visited her in Rome and she sculpted his bust; his family
praised the piece. She had previously
created pieces based on Longfellow’s poem, Song
of Hiawatha, and it’s possible he saw these pieces when he visited her.
Edmonia was
rare in Rome at the time because she did all of her own work. Most sculptors would create the model and
then hire Italian workers to carve the marble.
Edmonia did all the carving herself, possibly “to forestall expected
suggestions that a black woman could not possibly have created works of such
skill and accomplishment” (6). Because
of this though, “fewer examples and duplicates of Lewis’s work survive than
other sculptors of the period” (7).
In 1870 Edmonia had an exhibition
in Chicago, and in 1871 in Rome. In
1873, Edmonia received two $50,000 commissions.
Her studio became a tourist spot in Rome, being featured in guide books
as a destination. A big boost to her
profile was having a piece in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia. For this Edmonia created a
3,015 lb., full length sculpture of The
Death of Cleopatra. People weren’t
sure about the subject matter dealing with death, but thousands still came to
view it.
After Philadelphia, Cleopatra was exhibited in Chicago in
1878. It was eventually purchased by a
gambler and was used to mark the grave of a racehorse named Cleopatra. After this it was put in storage and damaged
by some Boy Scouts who painted the sculpture.
Eventually the piece was rediscovered by the Forest Park Historical
Society and was donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1994. Cleopatra
was cleaned and restored to near-original condition.
As neoclassical art decreased in
popularity, so did Edmonia. She had become
a Catholic in 1868 and continued to do work for Catholic patrons, but her
profile was on the decline. She
travelled to the US for exhibits of her works.
In 1883 she created an altarpiece for a church in Baltimore. Two of her pieces, Hiawatha and Phyllis Wheatley,
were exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
In 1901, Edmonia moved to London,
but after that little is known of her life.
She never married and never had children. It was speculated that she died in 1911 in
Rome, or in Marin County, California (she had travelled to San Francisco at
some point). But recent digging has
discovered that she died on September 17, 1907 in Hammersmith Borough Infirmary
in London from chronic kidney problems.
Edmonia’s pieces had faded from
memory, but many have been recently rediscovered. As mentioned, Cleopatra is now at the Smithsonian. Other pieces are at Howard University’s
Gallery of Art. In the early 2000s, a
play about Edmonia, Wildfire: Black
Hands, White Marble, was written by Linda Beatrice Brown.
2, 5 - Edmonia Lewis
3, 6 - Edmonia Lewis
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