Edmonia Lewis is perhaps one of art history’s most unlikely success stories. The first Black and Indigenous artist born in the U.S. to chart a path to international acclaim as a sculptor, she created classically inspired works that championed the social causes of the day, including emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. But she died in obscurity in 1907, buried in an unmarked grave in London.

Now, over a century after her death, Lewis’s remarkable career is the subject of her first-ever retrospective, thanks to “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. It is curated by Shawnya L. Harris, the curator of African American and African diasporic art at the Georgia Museum of Art—where the show will open in August—and Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, an American art curator formerly of the Georgia Museum, now at the PEM.

The remarkable traveling exhibition is the result of seven years of planning, in part due to the logistical and financial challenges of showing large-scale works in marble, Lewis’s favored medium. Many of her 70-to-80 known sculptures have also been lost over the decades, which meant some serious detective work to track down the 30 pieces on view.

“We wanted to provide as comprehensive a view of her career as possible,” Richmond-Moll said. “There was no cache of papers. It was a matter of sifting through, looking for fragments of correspondence and press interviews, and following those trails to find her work.”

Who Was Edmonia Lewis?

Born in 1844, Lewis became an orphan at an early age. Her father was a free Black man, and her mother was part African American and part Indigenous, of Mississauga descent, from the Chippewa nation, also known as Anishinaabe or Ojibwe.

As a child, Lewis, then known by her Native American name, Wildfire, spent years living with her maternal aunts near Niagara Falls, selling moccasins, embroidered blouses, and Ojibwe baskets to visiting tourists to support themselves. The exhibition includes several examples of similar works made by Indigenous artists of this period.

“Her mother’s family clearly instilled in her this kind of artistry and creative vision that carries throughout her lifetime. She describes learning how to do bead work and quill work and basketry and not just making but also selling that work at markets,” Richmond-Moll said.

The family’s fortunes took a dramatic turn when her older half-brother, Samuel Lewis, set off for San Francisco, striking it rich in the California gold rush. With his newfound fortune, Samuel paid for Lewis’s education, including at Ohio’s Oberlin College, one of the first institutions to admit women and non-white students.

Lewis’s tenure at the school was marked by repeated controversies, as she was accused of poisoning two of her white female classmates, and, later, of stealing art supplies. These incidents sparked physical violence against Lewis, who was kidnapped, beaten, and left naked in a field. Though she was found innocent in both cases, Lewis never graduated. (The school awarded her degree posthumously in 2022.)

But her time at Oberlin proved formative, in that Lewis met the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass during a visit to the school.

“He recognizes in her a talent for her art, and he’s one of the people who encourages her to go East and pursue that career. So she goes to New York and then Boston, and she decides to pursue a career as a professional artist,” Richmond-Moll said.

Lewis arrived in Boston in 1864. She had some difficulty finding an instructor, but studied under Edward Augustus Brackett, a self-taught sculptor best known for his marble bust of abolitionist John Brown. Lewis held her first solo show at her studio by year’s end.

“She was entrepreneurial,” Richmond-Moll said. “She cultivates a network of abolitionist patrons in the city of Boston.”

Lewis became known for works like the first U.S. sculpture of a named Black subject, her now-lost 1864 plaster statuette of Sergeant William H. Carney, a member of the all-Black Massachusetts 54th regiment who kept the American flag aloft during a battle in the Civil War.

She supported herself with the sale of easily reproduced plaster busts of abolitionist figures such as Brown and Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the Union Army’s second all-black unit, the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, who was killed in action in 1863. (The version at PEM was rediscovered in the collection of the Massachusetts Air National Guard Historical Association in Concord, thanks to a Facebook post.)

Through the sale of her work, Lewis was able to afford to travel to Rome in 1866, following in the footsteps of other American women sculptors such as Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, and Florence Freeman. (In a fitting connection for the PEM, it was two sisters from Salem, Mary Elizabeth Williams and Abigail Osgood Williams, who welcomed her and found her an apartment and studio.) Lewis would go on to spend the majority of her career in Rome.

“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture,” she told the New York Times in 1878. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”

There, taking over the former studio of the great Antonio Canova, she forged a successful career. Drawing on her childhood experiences in the markets of Niagara Falls, demonstrating painstaking beading techniques to awed tourists, she opened her studio to the public, chisel in hand. (Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not rely on Italian artisans to carve the final marble versions of her designs, opting to complete the works herself.) Her studio was listed as an attraction in guidebooks like Murray’s Handbooks for Travelers, and visitors included President Ulysses S. Grant.

And while Lewis never moved back to the states, she traveled to the U.S. eight times between 1865 and 1875, including an 1873 journey to California. Retaining close ties to the country of her birth allowed her to continue to build up an American collector base and place her art in public institutions there.

Many of Lewis’s works depicted prominent abolitionists. Her statue Forever Free (1867) depicted a Black man and woman literally breaking the chains of enslavement. It featured an inscription from the Emancipation Proclamation, and was likely the first sculpture by a Black artist to celebrate the end of slavery in the U.S.

Lewis relied on commissions to support herself, but she had faith that works of her choosing would sell—so much so that she sent Forever Free to the U.S. in 1867 without having secured a buyer.

“She actually sent it collect, which meant the person picking up the shipment had to pay for it. And the person picking up the shipment didn’t know that!” Richmond-Moll said.

She also challenged the myth of the vanishing American Indian with works like The Old Arrowmaker (1868), inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” The sculpture shows an Indigenous father passing along skills to his daughter, who plaits a mat of rushes while he crafts an arrowhead.

“These sculptures are so much about Native American perseverance, transcendence, and the sustaining of Native community,” Richmond-Moll said.

It is juxtaposed with white artists’ inaccurate representations of Native Americans as a vanishing race, such as Albert Bierstadt’s The Departure of Hiawatha, showing the title character retreating into a glowing sunset.

Lewis set an auction record of $1.63 million at Sotheby’s New York in January 2024 for her sculpture Hiawatha’s Marriage, handily exceeding the $250,000 to $350,000 estimate. (It went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which loaned it to the current exhibition.) The artist’s previous high, of $314,500, had stood since 2009. Lewis’s work rarely comes to auction, with only 25 lots recorded in the Artnet Price Database—but in all three auctions since setting the record, the works have failed to find a buyer.

Noticeably absent from the exhibition is Lewis’s masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra, which debuted to acclaim—and nearly 10 million visitors—at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In the decades that followed, the six-foot-tall sculpture was neglected and forgotten. At one point, a racetrack owner bought it from a Chicago saloon and used it to mark the grave of his prized horse, also named Cleopatra.

A fire inspector rediscovered it in a junkyard in the 1980s and enlisted a local Boy Scout troop to help fix it up. (They unfortunately covered it with latex house paint.) Then, in 1988, Marilyn Richardson, a dedicated scholar of the artist, tracked down the work at a Chicago mall, packed away in a storage closet with holiday decorations. From there, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., acquired it, painstakingly restoring Cleopatra to her former glory.

“It is just too fragile to travel,” Richmond-Moll said. “So we have created a kind of full-scale theatrical reproduction of that work to give it presence in the gallery.”

Little is known about Lewis’s final years. She lived in Paris between 1886 and 1901, then moved to London. By this point, Neoclassical sculpture had fallen out of style, and she died in obscurity.

Her death records remained unknown for decades, uncovered again through Richardson’s research. Bobbie Reno, the town historian in Greenbush, New York, where Lewis was born, successfully campaigned to restore Lewis’s grave, erecting a black polished granite headstone in her honor in 2017.

“She’s an artist that unfortunately not many people know today. But as soon as you learn about her, you don’t forget her,” Richmond-Moll said.

And Lewis was never fully forgotten, especially by the Black community. The exhibition includes work inspired by her by Harlem Renaissance great Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller in the 1920s.

Lewis will also be the subject of a three-part exhibition later this year at Tinworks Art and the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, that for the first time presents her life and career alongside that of her brother, Samuel Lewis. Mining gold was just the first act for Samuel, a performer, musician, and magician who worked as a circus tightrope walker, a barber, and a real-estate developer.

In the Black community in Bozeman that sprang up after the Civil War, Samuel became a leader. The Samuel Lewis House there has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1999. The exhibition celebrating the siblings will include contemporary work by artists such as Sanford Biggers and Sonya Clark, and an immersive commission by Auriea Harvey that imagines Lewis’s visiting her brother in Bozeman, which she never did in life. (Like Lewis, Harvey is an African American sculptor who lives in Rome.)

And then there’s a book, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis, coming out in June, from Jennifer DeVere Brody, who curated a small exhibition of Lewis’s work at the Cantor Arts Center at California’s Stanford University last fall.

All together, it’s a major moment for Lewis that stands to reestablish her place in the art historical canon—and help fill in the gaps in what scholars know about her life and career.

“I think there are more works that are hiding, perhaps in plain sight,” Richmond-Moll said. “We hope that more works come out of the woodwork during the course of the exhibition’s run.” (Artnet News)

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