African American Great artist, Edmonia Lewis from 1844-1907
Below in this page, we will be discussing on the popular and one of the great African American artist, Edmonia Lewis who was born free during the slave time in upstate New York in 1844.
She was the daughter of a Haitian father and a part-Chippewa mother, Edmonia Lewis and became the first Black and Native American artist to achieve international recognition for her ravishing neoclassical sculptures. Yh it was amazing sculptures.
Edmonia studied in Oberlin college and later began her career in Boston with her making clay and plaster medallions of abolitionists and there in Oberlin, Lewis was accused of attempting to poison her fellow classmate and roommate..
She was later declared innocent after trial but the abuse and racist abuse never stopped as a mob of white men kidnapped, beat, and left her to die in a field in the winter of 1862 because of the poisoning charge of two of her classmates.
Lewis with her brothers help went to Boston and and then Rome.
She made sculptures not abolitionists including that of John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison and it went on to be a success after sales of these commemorative medallions, and a big bust by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw who was the commander of the first all-Black military regiment.
It wasn’t long and Lewis traveled to Europe and eventually settled in Rome and there in Rome she made a name for herself and her works where she received significant acclaim and commissions in the Eternal City.
You should know that Lewis was the most celebrated artists of Rome although she was black and race towards the people of color at that time was high but her status in Rome was Afro-Indian.
Naurice Frank Woods, a professor of African American studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of several books on 19th-century art said;
“Those venturing to her studio in Rome, particularly Americans on the Grand Tour, undoubtedly took note of a woman of color transforming white marble into magnificent works of art,”
– says Woods.
In all of Lewis work, she made an excellent and amazing sculpture arts and also depicted biblical figures, such as Hagar and the Death of Cleopatra that she exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and also in Baltimore 1883, she received her last major commission, a version of the Adoration of the Magi from a church.
According to reports, Edmonia Lewis was last been seen in Rome in 1909 or 1911, but death records discovered in the early 21st century show that she died in London in 1907.
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