EDMONIA LEWIS

'Edmonia Lewis' (born July 4, 1845 - died c.1911) was the first African American and Native American woman to gain fame and recognition as a sculptor. At a time in America when slaves were just freed, she found inspiration in the lives of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. In a world which didn’t encourage women of color, through incredible determination and sense of purpose, Edmonia Lewis created great art and received world acclaim.
The daughter of a Chippewa Indian woman and an African American man, Edmonia Lewis was born about 1845 near Albany, New York. Her parents died when she was young, and she went to live with her mother’s sisters in Niagara Falls. The Chippewa people named her Wildfire and taught her to make baskets and embroidered moccasins. Her brother, a California gold miner, arranged for her to enter Oberlin College in Ohio. At the school, Lewis was accused of theft and of trying to poison two classmates. Although she was acquitted of both charges, she was not allowed to graduate.
Moving to Boston, Lewis studied with a local sculptor and began selling her work. She opened her own studio, where she created a number of pieces, including a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of an African American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, as well as medallion portraits of the abolitionists John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. In 1865 Lewis sailed for Europe, settling in Rome to continue her studies. Influenced by the Greco-Roman sculpture she saw there, she began creating works in a neoclassical style. By the time she returned to the United States in 1874, her patrons included distinguished families in this country and abroad. She was given receptions in Philadelphia dwindled and she eventually vanished from the art world. Lewis’s surviving works include Forever Free, which was acquired by the Howard University Gallery of Art, and Death of Cleopatra, in Washington’s National Museum of Art.
Nothing is known of Lewis' final years and her death has been calcuated to have occurred sometime around 1911. In 1996, the PBS television network featured Lewis in a "News Hour" piece hosted by Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Her story was also told by author Rinna Evelyn Wolfe in a 1998 biography titled '' and in ''A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present,'' by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson (Pantheon, 1993).

Contents

Selected sculptures

External links

References

Selected sculptures

★ ''Forever Free'' (1867)

★ ''Colonel Robert Gould Shaw'' (1864)

★ ''Minnehaha'' (1868)

★ ''The Marriage of Hiawatha'' (1869)

★ ''Henry Wordsworth Longfellow'' (1868)

★ ''The Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter (Wooing of Hiawatha)'' (1866)

★ ''Hagar in the Wilderness'' (1869)

★ ''Death of Cleopatra'' (1876)

★ ''Veiled Bride of Spring'' (1878)

External links

★ edmonialewis.com

★ A map showing the locations of sculptures created by Edmonia Lewis

★ An extensive collection of photographs of Edmonia Lewis's works

References

★ Fact Monster (2000). http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0878495.html

★ Miles, J. H., Davis, J. J., Ferguson-Roberts, S. E., and Giles, R. G. (2001). Almanac of African American Heritage. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Press.

★ Potter, J. (2002). African American Firsts. New York, NY: Kensington Publishing Corp.

★ Women in History (2006). http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/lewi-edm.htm.