Edmonia Lewis
Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire", was an American sculptor.
Born in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American heritage, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Her work is known for incorporating themes relating to Black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas into Neoclassical-style sculpture.
Life and career
Early life
According to the American National Biography, reliable information about her early life is limited, and Lewis "was often inconsistent in interviews even with basic facts about her origins, preferring to present herself as the exotic product of a childhood spent roaming the forests with her mother's people." On official documents she variously gave 1842, 1844, and 1854 as her birth year. She was born near Albany, New York. Most of her girlhood was apparently spent in Newark, New Jersey.Her mother, Catherine Mike Lewis, was African-Native American, of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent. She was an excellent weaver and craftswoman. Two different African-American men are mentioned in different sources as being her father. The first is Samuel Lewis, who was Afro-Haitian and worked as a valet. Other sources say her father was the writer on African Americans, Robert Benjamin Lewis. Her half-brother Samuel, who is treated at some length in a history of Montana, said that their father was "a West Indian Frenchman", and his mother "part African and partly a descendant of the educated Narragansett Indians of New York state."
By the time Lewis reached the age of nine, both of her parents had died; Catherine Lewis died in 1847 and Robert Benjamin Lewis in 1853. Her two maternal aunts adopted her and her older half-brother Samuel. Samuel was born in 1835 to his father of the same name, and his first wife, in Haiti. The family came to the United States when Samuel was a young child. Samuel became a barber at age 12 after their father died.
The children lived with their aunts near Niagara Falls, New York, for about four years. Lewis and her aunts sold Ojibwe baskets and other items, such as moccasins and embroidered blouses, to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Buffalo. During this time, Lewis went by her Native American name, Wildfire, while her brother was called Sunshine. In 1852, Samuel left for San Francisco, California, leaving Lewis in the care of a Captain S. R. Mills.
Samuel's endeavors in the California gold rush proved successful, and by the time Edmonia got to college, he "supplied her every want to anticipate her wishes after the style and manner of a person of ample income".
In 1856, Lewis enrolled in a pre-college program at New York Central College, a Baptist abolitionist school in McGrawville. There Lewis met many of the leading activists who would become mentors, patrons, and possible subjects for her work as her artistic career developed. In a later interview, Lewis said that she left the school after three years, having been "declared to be wild."
However, her academic record at Central College shows that her grades, "conduct", and attendance were all exemplary. Her classes included Latin, French, "grammar", arithmetic, drawing, composition, and declamation.
Education
In 1859, when Edmonia Lewis was about 15 years old, her brother Samuel and abolitionists sent her to Oberlin, Ohio, where she attended the secondary Oberlin Academy Preparatory School for the full, three-year course, before entering Oberlin Collegiate Institute, one of the first U.S. higher-learning institutions to admit women and people of differing ethnicities. The Ladies' Department was designed "to give Young Ladies facilities for the thorough mental discipline, and the special training which will qualify them for teaching and other duties of their sphere." She changed her name to Mary Edmonia Lewis and began to study art. Lewis boarded with Reverend John Keep and his wife from 1859 until she was forced from the college in 1863. At Oberlin, with a student population of one thousand, Lewis was one of only 30 students of color. Reverend Keep was white, a member of the board of trustees, an avid abolitionist, and a spokesperson for coeducation.Mary said later that she was subject to daily racism and discrimination. She, and other female students, were rarely given the opportunity to participate in the classroom or speak at public meetings.
During the winter of 1862, several months after the start of the US Civil War, an incident occurred between Lewis and two Oberlin classmates, Maria Miles and Christina Ennes. The three women, all boarding in Keep's home, planned to go sleigh riding with some young men later that day. Before the sleighing, Lewis served her friends a drink of spiced wine. Shortly after, Miles and Ennes fell severely ill. Doctors examined them and concluded that the two women had some sort of poison in their system, supposedly cantharides, a reputed aphrodisiac. For a time it was not certain that they would survive. Days later, it became apparent that the two women would recover from the incident. Authorities initially took no action.
News of the controversial incident spread rapidly throughout Ohio and was universally known in the town of Oberlin, where the general population was not as progressive as that of the college. While Lewis was walking home alone one night she was dragged into an open field by unknown assailants, badly beaten, and left for dead. After the attack, local authorities arrested Lewis, charging her with poisoning her friends. John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin College alumnus and the first African-American lawyer in Ohio, represented Lewis during her trial. Although most witnesses spoke against her and she did not testify, Chapman moved successfully to have the charges dismissed: the contents of the victims' stomachs had not been analyzed and there was, therefore, no evidence of poisoning, no corpus delicti.
The remainder of Lewis's time at Oberlin was marked by isolation and prejudice. About a year after the poisoning trial, Lewis was accused of stealing artists' materials from the college. She was acquitted due to lack of evidence. Only a few months later she was charged with aiding and abetting a burglary. At this point she had left. Another report says that she was forbidden from registering for her last term, leaving her unable to graduate.
Oberlin College awarded her a degree posthumously in 2022.
Art career
Boston
After college, Lewis moved to Boston in early 1864, where she began to pursue her career as a sculptor. She repeatedly told a story about encountering in Boston a statue of Benjamin Franklin, not knowing what it was or what to call it, but concluding she could make a "stone man" herself.The Keeps wrote a letter of introduction on Lewis's behalf to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, as did Henry Highland Garnet. He introduced her to already established sculptors in the area, as well as writers who publicized Lewis in the abolitionist press. Finding an instructor, however, was not easy for her. Three male sculptors refused to instruct her before she was introduced to the moderately successful sculptor, Edward Augustus Brackett, who specialized in marble portrait busts. His clients were some of the most important abolitionists of the day, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and John Brown.
To instruct her, he lent her fragments of sculptures to copy in clay, which he critiqued. Under his tutelage, she crafted her own sculpting tools and sold her first piece, a sculpture of a woman's hand, for $8. Anne Whitney, a fellow sculptor and friend of Lewis', wrote in an 1864 letter to her sister that Lewis's relationship with her instructor did not end amicably, but did not disclose the reason. Lewis opened her studio to the public with her first solo exhibition in 1864.
Lewis was inspired by the lives of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. Her subjects in 1863 and 1864 included some of the most famous abolitionists of her day: John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When she met Union Colonel Shaw, the commander of an African-American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, she was inspired to create a bust of his likeness. It impressed the Shaw family, which purchased it. Lewis then made plaster-cast reproductions of the bust and sold one hundred of these copies at 15 dollars apiece. It was her most famous work to date and the money she earned from the busts allowed her to move to Rome. Anna Quincy Waterston, a poet, then wrote a poem about Lewis and Shaw.
From 1864 to 1871, Lewis was written about or interviewed by Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, Anna Quincy Waterston, and Laura Curtis Bullard, all important women in Boston and New York abolitionist circles. Because of these women, articles about Lewis appeared in many important abolitionist journals, including Broken Fetter, the Christian Register, and the Independent. Lewis was aware of her reception in Boston. She was not opposed to the coverage she received in the abolitionist press, and she was not known to turn down financial assistance, but she could not tolerate false praise. She knew that some did not really appreciate her art, but saw her as an opportunity to demonstrate their support for human rights.
Early works that proved highly popular included medallion portraits of the abolitionists John Brown, described as "her hero", and Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Lewis also drew inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his work, particularly his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. She made several busts of its leading characters, for whom he had drawn on Ojibwe legend.