Edmonia Lewis

...overcame enormous prejudice — Victorian-era sexism, and double racism as an African-American / Amerindian woman of color — to become a world-renown sculptor.

She was born free in near Albany, New York around 1843 to 1845. Her father was black, and her mother was a member of the Niagara Falls branch of the Chippewa nation. After her parents died when she was nine, Edmonia lived with her mother's tribe, until her talent and her brother's Gold Rush money could send her to college.

Edmonia enrolled in Oberlin College, which admitted women, people of color, and all of the above, in 1859. Unfortunately, however, her stay was cut short by campus antics turned tragic—she allegedly spiked two white friends' drinks with an aphrodisiac, and they accused her of poisoning them. A racist mob seized Edmonia and beat her, but an excellent defense by John Mercer Langston (the most prominent black lawyer of the time) won her an aquittal at her trial. However, her reputation was ruined, and she left Oberlin for Boston soon after.

In Civil War-era Boston, Edmonia Lewis mingled with the city's 'radicals', including famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (and the less-famous Maria Weston Chapman, whom Edmonia sculpted in one of her first works), and sculptor Edward Brackett (who would give her scraps of his work to copy in clay—her only 'formal' training). She also met other female sculptors, Anne Whitney and Harriet Hosmer, who also struggled against the male art establishment—which further restricted Edmonia because of her color. Even though Edmonia's work, usually featuring anti-slavery activists and Union heroes, was popular in Boston, she found herself patronized by the white liberal elite in a way she definitely didn't like: backhanded, racist, sexist praise that insulted her talent.

Author Henry James wrote this bigotted little remark about Edmonia: "...one of the sisterhood, if I am not mistaken, was a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plaster material was the pleading agent of her fame" (Chadwick, 30). While the white marble she sculpted does present an irony, there is also the interplay of race and gender in her work. For example, in "Forever Free," a Black man raises his broken chains, while a white woman kneels beside him. The central role that women take in Lewis's other work, such as Cleopatra, suggest that this gesture speaks more of overturning the racial hierarchy, than re-inforcing the sexual one.

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