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“I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.” —Edmonia Lewis

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According to Biography.com, Mary Edmonia Lewis was born around 1844 in Greenbush, New York. Hailed as the first professional African-American and Native-American sculptor, Lewis had little training but overcame numerous obstacles to become a revered and respected artist who had a knack for exploring religious and classical themes in her work.

Her first notable commercial success was a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. In 1864, Lewis created a bust of the Colonel, known as a Civil War hero who had died leading the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment.

Sales of the copied bust allowed her to sail to Rome, Italy, where she mastered working in marble. She quickly achieved success as a sculptor.

Elusive when it came to personal details, Lewis claimed different years of birth throughout out her life, but research seems to indicate she was born around 1844 in upstate New York. The daughter of a black father and part-Ojibwa mother, she was orphaned at an early age and as she later claimed, raised by some of her mother’s relatives.

Following a childhood that saw her roam the woods with Chippewa Indians, Lewis found her way to abolitionist Oberlin College in Ohio, thanks to the support and encouragement of a successful older brother.

Life at Oberlin came to a violent end when Lewis was falsely accused of poisoning two white classmates. Captured and beaten by a white mob, she recovered from the attack and then escaped to Boston, Massachusetts after the charges against her were dropped.

Perhaps her most famous work was a commanding depiction of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, titled “The Death of Cleopatra.”

Met with critical acclaim when she showed it at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 and in Chicago two years later, the two-ton sculpture never returned to Italy with its creator because Lewis couldn’t afford the shipping costs. It was placed in storage and was rediscovered several decades after her death.

Much like her childhood, Lewis’s final years are shrouded in mystery.

Until the 1890s, she continued to exhibit her work and was even visited by Frederick Douglass in Rome, but little is known about the last decade or so of her life. It was speculated that Lewis spent her last years in Italy, but the recent discovery of death documents indicate that she died in London, England, in 1907.

In recent decades, however, Lewis’s life and art has received well-deserved respect.

Her pieces are now part of the permanent collections of the Howard University Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Citation Information

Article Title
Edmonia Lewis Biography

Author
Biography.com Editors

Website Name: The Biography.com website
URL: http://www.biography.com/people/edmonia-lewis-9381053

Access Date
February 1, 2017

Publisher
A&E Television Networks

Last Updated
May 20, 2015