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. She was orphaned at nine and raised by her mother's Ojibwe relatives in upstate New York. She studied at Oberlin College from 1859 to 1863 — leaving without a degree after a racially motivated accusation and trial in which she was acquitted.

She moved to Boston in 1864 and studied sculpture under Edward Augustus Brackett. Her first major commission — a portrait bust of the Black Civil War officer Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had led the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — sold one hundred copies in plaster reproduction and financed her relocation to Rome.

She arrived in Rome in 1865 and lived there for most of the next forty years. She joined the expatriate community of American women sculptors centered around Charlotte Cushman and Harriet Hosmer. Unlike her peers, who employed Italian carvers to execute their work from clay models, Lewis carved her own marble — a fact she insisted on having visible to American visitors as proof against the prevailing assumption that African American artists could not master the technical skills of high sculpture.

Her major works — Forever Free (1867, depicting an emancipated Black couple), Hagar (1875, on the abandoned Egyptian handmaid of Genesis), and The Death of Cleopatra (1876, exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia) — combined Neoclassical form with explicit themes from African and Native American experience.

She continued working in Rome through the 1880s and 1890s. She died in London on the seventeenth of September 1907, age approximately sixty-three.

She is honored here as the first sculptor of African and Native American descent to receive international recognition.