Edmonia Lewis confronted American slavery in her sculptures. Then history forgot her.
A new exhibition of her masterworks is traveling the country and reclaiming her place in American history.
Part celebrity, part anomaly, sculptor Edmonia Lewis captivated mid-19th-century audiences with her luminous, large-scale marble sculptures that appeared nearly lifelike in their carefully rendered detail. For wealthy Americans on the Grand Tour, a stop at her studio was practically necessary. But visitors weren’t just there to follow in the footsteps of Pope Pius IX and President Ulysses S. Grant, both admirers of Lewis, they were there to obtain proof. They wanted to see with their own eyes that Lewis, a petite biracial woman, could render life from stone.
For some, it beggared belief that her hands could have coaxed forth vivid expressions from blocks of Carrara marble. While she was able to delegate some of the brute work of carving to assistants, Lewis made a point of ensuring that the public saw her with a chisel in hand, an unusual choice for sculptors of the era. Even in the prime of her storied career, Lewis still needed to prove herself, to justify her talents, just as she had been doing her entire life.
Although she was internationally famous during her heyday, Lewis has largely been forgotten. She lived during a time of artistic rupture, and towards the end of her life, her Neoclassical-style sculptures had fallen deeply out of fashion, dismissed by an art world enraptured by the provocations of modernism. Abstraction became more exciting than the sentimental realism preferred by the Victorians, and Lewis was nothing if not a realist.
Now, a new exhibition is reviving Lewis’s reputation and reclaiming her place in America’s history. Spearheaded by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum and Shawnya L. Harris, curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” is a curatorial feat. The exhibition took over a decade to assemble, largely because Lewis’s impressive output had been scattered, forgotten, and in some cases, badly damaged.
“We are at a moment where, around the country, we’re asking questions about who should be a part of the stories we tell about our nation’s history and who has been left out,” says Richmond-Moll. “Said in Stone,” which will travel the United States through July 2027, includes 30 sculptures from throughout Lewis’s career, including early busts and later large-scale masterworks, plus dozens of additional objects—letters, photographs, examples of Indigenous crafts, and pieces by her contemporaries—that provide historical context and help fill the gaps left by works that remain missing. Together, these 115 items mark the first, long-overdue retrospective of the artist’s career, revealing the trailblazing sculptor behind the chisel.
(A Raphael masterpiece is finally back in one piece.)
From student to sculptor
Likely born in upstate New York in 1844, Edmonia Lewis spent her childhood with the Mississauga Ojibwe tribe—“my mother’s people,” as she called them. A young Lewis watched as her mother and aunts practiced beadwork, weaving, and leatherwork, and she often traveled with them to markets around the state, where they sold their art. “It instilled in her a creative vision,” says Richmond-Moll. It also taught her how to market her work to audiences that found her exotic, a useful lesson she used later as her star rose.
When she was a teenager, Lewis became much closer with her older half-brother, Samuel Lewis, a Black man of Caribbean descent. Although they spent their adult lives living thousands of miles apart, his financial support was indispensable to her scholarly and artistic career. With money acquired during the California gold rush, Samuel was able to send his talented little sister to college, starting at New York Central College where she was introduced to abolitionist intellectuals and members of the Underground Railroad. In 1859, Lewis enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she studied art. Frederick Douglass, who met Lewis during this period, later reflected that she “exhibited some signs of talent in drawing and painting.”
Her time at Oberlin was cut tragically short when two white housemates accused her of poisoning them. Though she was later found innocent at a public trial, the allegations enraged the local community, making the biracial Lewis even more of a target. In response, a group of white men kidnapped Lewis, took her to the woods, and viciously assaulted her. She was found half alive the next day.
Ohio wasn’t safe for Lewis, and with Douglass’s urging, and her brother’s financial support, she moved east. She secured an apprenticeship in Boston where she was trained and mentored in the lucrative Neoclassical style, a formal aesthetic approach popular in America and Europe. There, she also befriended a group of women sculptors, known casually as the “white marmorean flock,” a name given to them by novelist Henry James, referring to both their use of marble and, with vague belittlement, their gender. Through their connections, Lewis received an invitation to travel to Italy.
“If you were a sculptor, all the best marble was in Italy, and if you were Black, getting out of the United States was a dream come true,” explains Lisa Farrington, an expert on Black artists. Lewis would never live in America again, preferring to spend the rest of her life in Europe, where, according to Farrington, “racism was so much less extreme.”
Lewis funded her immigration to Rome in part with sales of her sculptures. Among her finest works made before she left America was a bust of Civil War heroes Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and a plaster statuette of Sergeant William Carney. Formerly an enslaved man, Carney was a Black Union soldier who received the Medal of Honor in 1900 for his gallantry under fire; Gould commanded the 54th Massachusetts, the Army’s first all-Black unit. Lewis was hinting at her politics, playing with representation: who could be depicted in Carrara marble was a weighty top since the stone itself carried deep significance—it was, after all, the same material used by Old Masters like Michelangelo. The choice of subjects revealed Lewis’s values and allegiances, and, in the safety of Rome, her voice would become even more pronounced.
“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art, culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color,” Lewis wrote years later. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
(One of the hardest colors to make is not just blue--it's actually cerulean.)
The freedom of Rome
In Rome, Lewis embraced her newfound freedom to explore subjects that resonated with her and reflected her perspective rather than those of her largely white audience. Some of her most famous works from this period depict scenes of liberation and salvation, including "Forever Free" and "Hagar in the Wilderness." Sculpted in 1867, "Forever Free" shows a man standing with broken chains clasped in his fist, a female figure kneeling by his side, a clear allegory for the emancipation of American slaves. "Hagar in the Wilderness," finished in 1875, shows the Old Testament figure, an Egyptian slave given to Abraham by his wife for the purpose of childbearing, as she wanders in the wilderness, pregnant and cast out.
Though Hagar is sculpted from white marble, she has purposefully been rendered to be racially ambiguous, and contemporary viewers—well-versed in Biblical narratives—would have understood that she was pregnant with the child of her enslavers. Lewis depicts Hagar standing straight and unbowed, as she looks hopefully towards the sky, ready to receive the word of God. Here, the artist is quite clearly making a statement about the dignity and grace of enslaved Black women, many of whom suffered a similar fate.
In the 1860s and 1870s, Lewis completed a series of works inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. First published in 1855, the poem follows the adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha, who falls in love with Minnehaha, a member of the Dakota tribe. Despite mixed critical responses, the entertaining yarn became one of the most influential books of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Lewis completed multiple sculptures depicting Hiawatha, Minnehaha, and her father, the old arrow-maker, since dubbed “the Longfellow Series.” In the series Lewis displays a genuine appreciation for the crafts of her Native American ancestors, depicting the fine textures of bark weaving and beadwork with skill and care. In contrast to white artists and writers of the time, who tended to depict Minnehaha as a submissive and deferential figure, Lewis emphasizes her artistry and agency. In one of the sculptures from the “Longfellow Series,” the "Old Arrow Maker," Lewis shows Minnehaha interrupted at her weaving, looking boldly at the viewer, ready to meet her fate.
For Harris and Richmond-Moll, the inclusion of the "Old Arrow Maker" is something of a coup. Like many of Lewis’s works, it had been long assumed lost, known only from photographs and documents. “We never thought it would resurface,” says Harris. “But then a private collector donated it to the Colby College Museum.”
Other pieces have been found in small-town historical societies and various private collections. Few were as badly handled as Lewis’s most ambitious work, the piece that she hoped would ensure her legacy, the life-sized "Death of Cleopatra." The awe-inspiring sculpture depicts the Egyptian queen shortly after her death: dressed in full regalia, enthroned, and still clutching a deadly asp in her hand.
Lewis was unable to sell the two-ton sculpture—exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and in Chicago in 1878—and placed it in storage rather than ship it back to Europe. Then the marble sculpture disappeared from records for over a century only to resurface in the 1990s, covered in paint and degraded by the elements. The work had been purchased in the early 20th century by a wealthy Chicago racehorse owner who used it to mark the grave his favorite horse, which had been named after the Egyptian queen. Over the decades, the land changed hands, and the history of the 3,000-pound sculpture was forgotten. It was covered with graffiti, then painted white by a group of well-meaning Boy Scouts, and moved into storage by a Chicago-area dentist. The work was eventually rediscovered in the late 1980s by an art historian who facilitated its donation to the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art. The museum restored the sculpture in the mid-1990s, where it's since been on display.
When Lewis originally exhibited the sculpture, critics were as equally horrified as they were mesmerized, disturbed by the imposing presence of a dead woman but impressed with Lewis’s artistry. “The effects of death,” one contemporary critic wrote, “are rendered with such skill as to be absolutely repellant.” But scholar Melissa Benbow Flowers, who has been working to uncover original writing by Lewis for the past decade, sees it differently.
“[Cleopatra] is in a position of power, not lying in bed,” Flowers says, “[Lewis] wanted her viewers to see Cleopatra dying as a queen, in full control of her fate.”
Lewis seized on the chatter about the sculpture and used it to her advantage. According to Flowers, Lewis was likely the author of an anonymously-published pamphlet from the 1870s on the topic of Cleopatra’s death. The pamphlet included interviews, poetry, and quotes from famous authors. “She was showing the intellectual labor that went into her 'Death of Cleopatra' sculpture,” Flowers says.
"The Death of Cleopatra" shows an artist at the height of her powers—creating large-scale works that left impressions on viewers. But Lewis’s skill couldn’t outpace the changing style of the fin de siècle. By the time of her death in 1907, her star had faded significantly. The artist never married and seems to have spent her last years alone (in her will, Lewis referred to herself as “Spinster and Sculptor”). Her letters weren’t saved; her studio was never preserved; her burial site was, for many years, a mystery until it was uncovered in England by a local sleuth. The dynamic, magnetic figure had fallen out of fashion.
In her later years, Lewis found inspiration in biblical stories. She made sculptures of the Virgin Mary, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Virgin and Child, which she had shipped to American churches. “Those have been lost to time,” says Richmond-Moll. “That was our biggest challenge in this exhibition. How do we present this full story in the face of absence?”
While Lewis couldn’t have predicted what would happen to her sculptures, Flowers suggests that she would have been comfortable with the gaps in her written legacy. “She had a choice in what she left behind,” she says. Lewis crafted her own public image, understanding quite well how she was perceived—and how often she was disbelieved. Her story was more complex than simple interpretations, but she never lost faith in her own talents and abilities.
"Sometimes the times were dark and the outlook was lonesome, but where there is a will, there is a way,” Lewis recalled in 1878. “That is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is bound to respect them for what they have accomplished.”
