Overlooked No More: Edmonia Lewis, Sculptor of Worldwide Acclaim |
Overlooked No More: Edmonia Lewis, Sculptor of Worldwide Acclaim
The New York Times
2018-07-25
 The 19th century sculptor Edmonia Lewis. The intense focus on her race both frustrated her and fueled her ambition. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum |
As an artist she transcended constraints, and as a woman of color, she confronted a society that wished to categorize her.
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
It was the middle of the 19th century, and Edmonia Lewis, part West Indian, part Chippewa, had the audacity to be an artist. It was risky enough for a free woman of color to pursue such a career, but to claim marble as her medium was to tilt at the Victorian conventions of the time, which decreed gentler aesthetic forms for the second sex, like poetry or painting.
Among the first black sculptors known to achieve widespread international fame, Lewis was raised Catholic, educated at Oberlin College in Ohio and mentored by abolitionists in Boston. She lived much of her life in Rome, sailing to Europe in 1865 and joining a community of American sculptors there who included female artists derided by the author Henry James as “a white marmorean flock.”…
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Tags: Edmonia Lewis, Kirsten Pai Buick, Marilyn Richardson, New York Times, Penelope Green, The New York Times