On Edmonia Lewis

A black, native woman who succeeded in a world of white sculptors

In the largest of the American Art galleries at the St. Louis Museum of Art, a marble bust sits on a plinth. The woman has smooth skin, and her wavy hair is gently pulled back and embellished with two roses. Curls drape down her neck, one curving just over her shoulder. She wears a delicate lace top, pinned with another rose and two seven-petaled flowers.

My fellow museum educators and I all admire the details of this white stone, vibrant with the woman’s life. The artist who carved it is Edmonia Lewis.

Lewis lived first in New York, then Boston, and later in Rome. A sculptor, she created exquisite busts both of famous people such as Abraham Lincoln—reproduced and sold to support her other artistic projects—as well as commissions from the wealthy. She even once visited St. Louis, and created commissioned busts of her hosts, James and Antoinette Thomas, heads of a family of “colored aristocrats.” Later, she created even more ambitious works, including a much admired and debated sculpture of Cleopatra, with historically accurate Black features.

Lewis’s mother was Ojibwe (you may know them as Cherokee) and Black (probably). Her father was Black. As she worked diligently at her art, she became the first internationally known black and native sculptor.

Preparing for a Pride Month tour, I found myself once again admiring the bust she carved. Some historians suspect that Lewis may have been lesbian. In Rome, she lived in a community of women that included queer women, and although there was once an newspaper announcement of her engagement to be wed, there was no mention of her partner’s name. These could be clues to lesbian sexuality, or they could just as easily be features of a heterosexual woman’s life.

I decided to include Lewis on my tour in part because of that ambiguity. We need to know that now and throughout history, there are people like us, whether we be native, Black, queer, or some other (combination of) identities, and it has been (and is) too often the case that we must hide or downplay those identities in order to live in our world. Whether we know a historical person’s identity for certain, we can still find strength in their story.

While her sexuality is unknown to history, we do know that Lewis drew attention to the difference of her race compared to other well known sculptors. She once said in an interview:

“I felt the strangest sensation putting on dresses. I had never worn anything but blankets. (Laughing) You see I had good opportunities for studying the nude.”

She described herself as the “wild” native person that people expected in the mid-1800s, and the art world was enchanted, just as she anticipated. And when she created her works, she didn’t follow the typical neoclassical form popular in the mid-1800s, and instead created her own, contemporary take on the art. For these reasons, I see her as queer in a broader sense than sexuality.

Before she was famous and successful, Lewis had help. In Rome, she drew strength, connections, and cultural insights from fellow women artists.

Even earlier, her brother, Samuel Lewis, paid for Edmonia’s schooling at New York Central College and Oberlin College. Later, he funded her travel from the United States to Italy. Samuel owned barber shops and succeeded in mining gold. He could earn money more easily than she could, and he shared this success with his sister.

I’ve been reading Linda Nochlin’s, “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” In her essay, which counters its titular question, she comments on a common biographical feature of successful women artists throughout history:

“They all, almost without exception, were either the daughters of artist fathers, or, generally later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, had a close personal connection with a stronger or more dominant male artistic personality. Neither of these characteristics is, of course, unusual for men artists, either, as we have indicated above in the case of artist fathers and sons: it is simply true almost without exception for their feminine counterparts, at least until quite recently.” [Emphasis mine.]

Throughout her essay, Nochlin talks about how women—and people of other underrepresented identities—face often insurmountable barriers in the systems they face. While she emphasizes the trend of the helpful male artists supporting women artists, Samuel’s financial support had a similar effect for Edmonia. Nochlin describes this advantage of a supportive male loved one not to diminish the worthiness of these artists’ success, but to show that it must and in some ways can be, with great effort, overcome.

As we honor Juneteenth today—the day in 1865 when the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas finally learned that they were free—I remember Edmonia Lewis. She pursued her art despite the world she lived in.

On that day, across the country from Galveston, Lewis would have been about 12 years old. She carved the St. Louis Art Museum’s bust just eight years later.

The tides of equity, safety, and freedom shift back and forth and back. Each person who brings us forward builds the tide for the world we imagine.

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Mentioned in this issue: “Portrait of a Woman” by Edmonia Lewis; quotations from Race and Racism in 19th Century Art by Dimock and Woods; The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis; “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin (which you can also read for free on the web); and Juneteenth, a celebration and honoring of the day the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free.