BLACK CATHOLIC SCULPTRESS

While researching Robert Sheldon Duncanson, I noted that while there have been many fine Black artists in America, few are known.

A very talented Catholic Black sculptor, whose life was fascinating, was EDMONIA LEWIS, who was born around 1844 in Greenbush New York. She descended from African American and Native-American ancestry, becoming the first professional sculptor representing both communities and the only Black female of the era recognized in the American art scene. 

She was orphaned at an early age and, as she later claimed, was raised by some of her mother's relatives.

With the support and encouragement of a successful older brother, Edmonia attended Oberlin College in Ohio where she emerged as a talented artist. The abolitionist movement was active on the Oberlin campus and would greatly influence her later work. But life at Oberlin came to a violent end when she was falsely accused of poisoning two white classmates. Captured and beaten by a white mob, Edmonia recovered from the attack and then escaped to Boston, after the charges against her were dropped.

There she met sculptor and mentor-to-be Edward A. Brackett and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. After setting up her own studio, she began creating plaster medallions of famous abolitionists starting in the early 1860s, but it was her 1864 bust of Civil War hero Colonel Robert Shaw, who led the African American 54th Massachusetts Regiment, that brought her national prominence.

With the funds she earned from the copies she made of the Shaw bust, Edmonia furthered her art in Rome, sculpting in Neoclassical-style, where she was celebrated for works like Arrow Maker (1866), a sculpture of a Native American father teaching his daughter how to shape an arrow, and Forever Free (1867), a piece that emotionally captures two Black slaves encountering freedom for the first time. In Italy, Edmonia continued to work as an artist. Her work over the next several decades moved between African American themes to subjects influenced by her devout Catholicism.

Along with her busts of American presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and works that paid homage to her Catholic faith, Edmonia was also known for her marble depiction of Cleopatra called The Death of Cleopatra, which was on display at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876.

Much like her childhood,  her 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 she spent her last years in Rome, 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 have received posthumous acclaim. Her pieces are now part of the permanent collections of the Howard University Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.