Edmonia Lewis, the Misunderstood Sculptor Who Brought Stone to Life

The exhibition opens with Lewis’s sculpture “Forever Free” (1866-67). Roughly three and a half feet tall, it shows a man and a woman who’ve just heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. The man, shirtless and in cropped trousers, raises his broken shackles in one hand and puts his other on the shoulder of the woman, who’s kneeling, her eyes cast toward Heaven. Seen through the lens of the Civil War and its aftermath, the piece subverts every expectation. Lewis’s clientele, mostly white, would have expected her to make Lincoln the executor of freedom, as Thomas Ball did in his “Emancipation Memorial” (1876), on Capitol Hill, but, instead, she has her enslaved subjects manumit themselves. That might seem empowering, but is it? The woman is shrunken, subservient; the facial features of the two figures have been diluted to make them racially ambiguous. Then, there’s the marble itself: an antique medium applied to a historical event barely three years old, a medium full of associations of purity and racial hygiene put to the tune of liberation. (A bold decision, if you consider sentiments like Henrik Ibsen’s, from 1874: “I would rather see the head of a negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation.”) In sum, Lewis’s piece is a welter of contradictions. It’s timeless and bracingly new, regressive and cutting-edge. It’s the most conservatively radical sculpture I’ve ever seen.

Lewis made “Forever Free” after she arrived in Rome in 1865. Throughout the nineteenth century, American sculptors flocked to the Eternal City to be closer to the source—to the abundance of antiquities but also to the Apuan Alps in the north, with their marble quarries. Lewis found a space on Via Gregoriana, a former studio of Antonio Canova, the grand eminence of neoclassical sculpture, and was only a stone’s throw from the Villa Ludovisi, with its impressive collection of antique statuary, including the “Ludovisi Gaul”: a Hellenistic sculpture of a man who has just killed his wife and is driving a sword into his own chest, and a possible reference for the composition of “Forever Free.” Although Lewis seems to have led a vibrant life in Rome—hosting dinner parties, playing guitar for friends, attending the opera—her circumstances were different from other artists’. The reason she had left America, she told the Times, was “to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”

From childhood onward, Lewis’s life seemed to ricochet between misfortune and luck, one person’s cruelty and another’s kindness. Born in upstate New York, in 1844, to a free Afro-Caribbean father and a Mississauga mother, she was an orphan before the age of ten. She was taken in by her maternal aunts and learned how to make souvenirs, such as beaded moccasins and birch-bark baskets, that were sold to tourists around Niagara Falls. The details of her childhood are patchy, and it’s possible she wanted to keep it that way: “My early life cannot interest you,” she told an interviewer. “It glided along smoothly, with no event of any importance, until I became seized with the idea of becoming a sculptress.” With the financial support of her half brother Samuel, who seems plucked from a story by Mark Twain—he lived various lives, as a tightrope walker, a barber, a gold miner, a sleight-of-hand showman, and a property developer—Lewis was able to afford a private liberal-arts education at New York Central College, and then at Oberlin, the first coed and racially integrated college in America. In the end, that didn’t make much of a difference. Lewis was accused of poisoning two white female housemates, assaulted by a white mob in response to the charge, and acquitted in court, only to then be accused of stealing art supplies and prohibited from reënrolling. Fortunately, she met Frederick Douglass as he was passing through Ohio. He praised her student drawings and paintings, and urged her to “seek the East.” In 1863, Lewis moved to Boston and started her apprenticeship with Brackett. Two years later, she was in Rome.

There are twenty-nine sculptures by Lewis in the exhibition—the earliest from 1864 and the latest from 1880—and, even though she received commissions into the eighteen-nineties, most of her surviving work belongs to the first two decades of her career. Her busts of wealthy abolitionists and famous men, such as Lincoln and Longfellow, come across as the meat and potatoes of a commercial artistic practice, but her group sculptures are tantalizingly tricky. Each one is like a Russian nesting doll of political self-consciousness, one kernel of meaning hidden inside the next. Are they works of activist art masquerading as decorative kitsch, or the other way around? Are they designed to flatter progressive sensibilities or provoke them? Of the various group sculptures in the exhibition, including “The Old Indian Arrow Maker and His Daughter” (1866-67), “Hiawatha’s Marriage” (1866-70), and “Indian Combat” (1868), the piece I kept returning to, and crashing up against, was “Columbus” (1865-67).