During her lifetime, sculptor Edmonia Lewis was a true celebrity whose work sold for thousands of dollars. Her studio was regularly visited by wealthy Americans on their Grand Tour of Europe. And yet, few Americans recognize her name today.
White scholars — generally male — have controlled the narrative of art history in this country since its beginning. As a mixed-race female artist from the 1800s, Lewis’s work has been overlooked in the art history of the era. But “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” a new exhibition at Peabody Essex Museum nearly a decade in the making, has set out to change that.
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, the Peabody Essex’s curator of American art and Shawnya L. Harris, curator of African American and African diasporic art at the Georgia Museum of Art organized the exhibition. They’ve managed to gather 30 works by Lewis — the largest collection of her work ever assembled in one show.
Additional works by other artists and ephemera from the period help tell the astounding story of Lewis’s life and influence. The showproceeds chronologically, intertwining her complex and multi-layered life story with the neoclassical sculptures that she produced.