Trailblazers

Sanctuary celebrates Black History Month with a woman whose perseverance, bravery, and iconic sculptures paved the way for women artists everywhere.

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Edmonia Lewis
​(1844-1907)
Photo: NPG/Smithsonian Institute

Edmonia Lewis was born in 1844. She was the first sculptor of African American and Native American descent to achieve international recognition. Her father was Black, and her mother was Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indian.

In 1859 she attended Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the first schools to accept female and Black students. She developed an interest in the fine arts, but an accusation of poisoning, probably racially motivated, forced her to leave the school before graduating.

With the encouragement and financial support of her brother Samuel, she went to Boston in order to pursue her dream of becoming an artist, where she met portrait sculptor Edward Brackett and began her studies under his tutelage. With minimum training, she began to produce “portrait medallion” — small, generally circular, single-sided portrait medals — of well-known abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips.

Edmonia moved to Rome in 1865. She became involved with a group of American women sculptors and began to work in marble. In addition to creating portrait heads, she sculpted biblical scenes and figural works dealing with her Native American heritage and the oppression of Black people.

Her studio in Rome became a “must-see” for Americans touring Europe, and she continued to create busts of famous Americans. A testament to Edmonia’s renown as an artist came in 1877, when former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant commissioned her to do his portrait. He reportedly sat for the portrait.
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Her largest and most powerful work was titled “The Death of Cleopatra.” The sculpture, depicting the last moments of Egyptian Queen Cleopatra’s life, took four years for Lewis to complete and ended up weighing 3,000 pounds.
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In 1907, she died in London of chronic kidney failure.

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Some interesting facts...

• Orphaned at an early age, Edmonia grew up in her mother's tribe where her life revolved around fishing, swimming, and making and selling crafts.
• In the winter of 1862, a white mob attacked her. Beaten and left to die, because of reports that she had poisoned two fellow Oberlin College students by drugging their wine with “Spanish Fly,” she refused to abandon her dreams. While struggling to recover from serious injuries, she went to court and was acquitted.
• Sculptors usually hired local workmen to carve their final pieces, but Edmonia did all her own stonework out of fear that her work would not be accepted as original if she didn’t.
• Her nickname was “Wildfire.”
• She sculpted leaders of the anti-slavery movement, religious figures, and subjects that her own dual heritage inspired.
• Not much is known about the last decades of her life when she became more reclusive.
• While living her last years in Europe, she occasionally traveled back to the United States to showcase her art.
• Her work can be found in some of the most important and famous American museums, including the Howard University Gallery of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois

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