The Invincible Spirit of Edmonia Lewis
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is presenting “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” described as the first major retrospective of sculptor Edmonia Lewis (born 1844 in Greenbush, New York; died 1907 in London), organized with the Georgia Museum of Art. The exhibition includes 30 Neoclassical white marble sculptures by Lewis along with archival materials and works by other artists, and it is structured to address her Black and Indigenous ancestries in parallel through four themed rooms: “Antislavery and Emancipation,” “Indigenous Artistic Worlds,” “the Studios of Rome,” and “Religion, Mythology, Transcendence.” It situates Lewis’s career within her move from Boston to Rome in 1865, where she worked until the early 1890s before relocating to London. The show argues that within a few years of arriving in Italy, Lewis became the first woman artist of Black and Indigenous descent to achieve widespread international acclaim.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Auction Fever, Art’s Lost-and-Found Reckoning