Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia Lewis built an international career under conditions that made artistic training and patronage unusually difficult for a woman of Black and Indigenous heritage in nineteenth-century America. After early work in Boston, she moved to Rome and joined a circle of expatriate women sculptors.

Her marble portraits and narrative subjects use the formal language of Neoclassicism while addressing emancipation, faith, Indigenous identity, and literary history. Lewis also performed much of her own carving, an important assertion of authorship in an industry often reliant on studio assistants.