Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" (c. July 4, 1844 – September 17, 1907), was an American sculptor. Born in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American (Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage, she moved to Rome, Italy in 1866, where she spent most of her career.
She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Her work is known for incorporating themes relating to Black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas into Neoclassical-style sculpture.
Life and career Early life
According to the American National Biography, reliable information about her early life is limited, and Lewis "was often inconsistent in interviews even with basic facts about her origins, preferring to present herself as the exotic product of a childhood spent roaming the forests with her mother's people." On official documents she variously gave 1842, 1844, and 1854 as her birth year. She was born near Albany, New York. Most of her girlhood was apparently spent in Newark, New Jersey.
Her mother, Catherine Mike Lewis, was African-Native American, of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent. She was an excellent weaver and craftswoman. Two different African-American men are mentioned in different sources as her father. The first is Samuel Lewis, an Afro-Haitian who worked as a valet. Other sources say her father was the writer on African Americans Robert Benjamin Lewis. Her half-brother Samuel, who is treated at some length in a history of Montana, said that their father was "a West Indian Frenchman" and his mother "part African and partly a descendant of the educated Narragansett Indians of New York state". (The Narragansett people are originally from Rhode Island.)
By the time Lewis reached the age of nine, both her parents had died; Catherine Lewis died in 1847 and Robert Benjamin Lewis in 1853. Her two maternal aunts adopted her and her older half-brother Samuel. Samuel was born in Haiti in 1835 to his father of the same name and his first wife. The family came to the United States when Samuel was a young child. Samuel became a barber at the age of 12 after father's death.
The children lived with their aunts near Niagara Falls, New York, for about four years. Lewis and her aunts sold Ojibwe baskets and other items, such as moccasins and embroidered blouses, to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Buffalo. During this time, Lewis went by her Native American name, Wildfire, while her brother was called Sunshine. In 1852, Samuel left for San Francisco, California, leaving Lewis in the care of a Captain S. R. Mills.
Samuel's endeavors in the California gold rush proved successful, and by the time Edmonia attended college, he "supplied her every want to anticipate her wishes after the style and manner of a person of ample income".
In 1856, Lewis enrolled in a pre-college program at New York Central College, a Baptist abolitionist school in McGrawville (now McGraw, New York). There Lewis met many of the leading activists who would become her mentors, patrons, and possible subjects for her work as her career developed. In a later interview, Lewis explained her early departure from the school:
However, her academic record at Central College (1856–fall 1858) shows that her grades, "conduct", and attendance were all exemplary. Her classes included Latin, French, grammar, arithmetic, drawing, composition, and declamation.
Education In 1859, when Edmonia Lewis was about 15 years old, her brother Samuel, who had made a fortune in the California gold rush, paid for her to be sent her to Oberlin, Ohio, where she attended the secondary Oberlin Academy Preparatory School for the full, three-year course, before entering Oberlin Collegiate Institute (since 1866, Oberlin College), one of the first institutions of higher-learning in the U.S. to admit women and Black people. The Ladies' Department was designed "to give Young Ladies facilities for the thorough mental discipline, and the special training which will qualify them for teaching and other duties of their sphere." She changed her name to Mary Edmonia Lewis; and began to study art. At Oberlin, with a student population of one thousand, Lewis was one of only 30 students of color. Lewis boarded with Reverend John Keep and his wife from 1859 until she was forced from the college in 1863. Reverend Keep was white, a member of the college's board of trustees, an avid abolitionist, and a spokesperson for coeducation.
Mary said later that she was subject to daily racism and discrimination. She and other female students, were rarely given the opportunity to participate in the classroom or speak at public meetings.
During the winter of 1862, several months after the start of the US Civil War, an incident occurred between Lewis and two of her roommates and fellow Oberlin classmates, Maria Miles and Christina Ennes. Miles and Ennes planned to go sleigh riding with some young men later that day. Before they left, Lewis served the two girls a drink of spiced wine. Shortly after, several miles into the sleigh ride, Miles and Ennes fell severely ill with intense stomach pains. Doctors examined them and concluded that the two girls had been poisoned (reportedly with cantharides also known as "Spanish Fly", a reputed aphrodisiac) and claimed they were likely to die. However days later, it became apparent that the two women would recover and authorities initially took no action.
News of the controversial incident spread rapidly throughout Ohio and was universally known in the town of Oberlin, where the general population was not as progressive as that of the college. One night while Lewis was walking home alone, she was dragged into an open field by unknown assailants, badly beaten, and left for dead.; A few days after the attack, local authorities arrested Lewis, charging her with the poisoning. However, she had been so badly injured in the attack, she could not even walk, and the trial was postponed. Her attackers were never identified.
John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin College alumnus and the first African-American lawyer in Ohio, represented Lewis during her trial. Although most witnesses spoke against her and she did not testify, Chapman moved successfully to have the charges dismissed: the contents of the victims' stomachs had not been analyzed and there was therefore no evidence of poisoning, no corpus delicti.
The remainder of Lewis's time at Oberlin was marked by isolation and prejudice. About a year after the trial, Lewis was accused of stealing artists' materials from the college. The case was, once again, dismissed due to lack of evidence. A few months later, she was charged with aiding and abetting a burglary. At this point, she had left. Another report says that she was forbidden from registering for her last term, leaving her unable to graduate.
Oberlin College awarded her a degree posthumously in 2022.
Career in Boston
After college, Lewis moved to Boston, the center of the abolitionist movement, in early 1864, where she began to pursue her career as a sculptor. It was on her first trip to Boston, according to stories she would later tell, that she encountered a statue of Benjamin Franklin, not knowing what it was or what to call it, but concluding she could make a "stone man" herself.
Reverend Keep wrote a letter of introduction on Lewis's behalf to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, as did Henry Highland Garnet. He introduced her to established sculptors in the area, as well as writers who publicized Lewis in the abolitionist press. Finding an instructor, however, was not easy for her. Three male sculptors refused to instruct her before she was introduced to the moderately successful sculptor, Edward Augustus Brackett (1818–1908), who specialized in marble portrait busts. His clients were some of the most important abolitionists of the day, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and John Brown.
To instruct her, Brackett lent her clay and fragments of sculptures to copy, which he critiqued. Under his tutelage, she crafted her own sculpting tools and sold her first piece, a sculpture of a woman's hand, for $8. Anne Whitney, a fellow sculptor and friend of Lewis', wrote in an 1864 letter to her sister that Lewis's relationship with her instructor did not end amicably, but did not disclose the reason. Lewis opened her studio to the public with her first solo exhibition in 1864.
Her subjects in 1863 and 1864 included some of the most famous abolitionists of her day, including John Brown and Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When she met Shaw, the commander of the first all-Black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, she was inspired to create a bust of his likeness. It impressed the Shaw family, who purchased it. Lewis then made plaster-cast reproductions of the bust and sold one hundred of these copies at $15 apiece. It was her most famous work at the time; Anna Quincy Waterston, a poet, then wrote a poem about Lewis and Shaw.
Between 1864 to 1871, Lewis was written about or interviewed by Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, Anna Quincy Waterston, and Laura Curtis Bullard, all important women in Boston and New York abolitionist circles. Because of these women, articles about Lewis appeared in many important abolitionist journals, including Broken Fetter, the Christian Register, and the Independent. Lewis was aware of her reception in Boston. She was not opposed to the coverage she received in the abolitionist press, and she was not known to turn down financial assistance, but she could not tolerate false praise. She knew that some did not really appreciate her art, but used her as an opportunity to demonstrate their support for human rights.
Early works that proved highly popular included her medallion portraits of the abolitionists John Brown, described as "her hero", and William Lloyd Garrison. Lewis also drew inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his work, particularly his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. She made several busts of its leading characters, for whom Longfellow had drawn on Ojibwe legend.
Career in Rome
The success and popularity of the works she created in Boston, particularly the reproductions of her bust of Shaw, allowed Lewis to finance a trip to Rome in 1866. On her 1865 passport is written, "M. Edmonia Lewis is a Black girl sent by subscription to Italy having displayed great talents as a sculptor". The established sculptor Hiram Powers gave her space to work in his studio. She entered a circle of expatriate artists and established her own space within the former studio of 18th-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, just off the Piazza Barberini. She received professional support from both Charlotte Cushman, a Boston actress and a pivotal figure for expatriate sculptors in Rome, and Maria Weston Chapman, a dedicated worker for the anti-slavery cause.