Edmonia Lewis

Mary Edmonia Lewis was born on the fourth of July, around 1844, in Greenbush, New York, to an African American father and a mother of Mississauga Ojibwe and African ancestry. Both parents died while she was still a child, and by the time she was about nine she was an orphan. She and her half-brother Samuel were taken in by their maternal aunts, and Edmonia — called "Wildfire" — grew up among her mother's Ojibwe people near Niagara Falls, selling baskets, moccasins, and embroidered work to travelers.

Her half-brother Samuel, who had prospered in the West, financed her education. She studied at New York Central College and then at Oberlin College, one of the first American institutions to admit women and students of color. There she endured a cruel ordeal — accused, beaten, and tried before being acquitted — yet she pressed on toward Boston to pursue sculpture.

In Boston she trained under Edward Brackett and won acclaim for medallion portraits of abolitionists such as John Brown and for a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Their success carried her to Rome in 1866, where she joined a circle of expatriate women sculptors and, unusually, carved her own marble rather than hiring Italian artisans. Works like Forever Free and The Death of Cleopatra championed emancipation and Indigenous dignity.

Edmonia Lewis became the first sculptor of African American and Native American descent to win international recognition, and she died in London in 1907. May her chisel, which turned marble into freedom, be honored across the generations.