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By Don Valentine
Edmonia Lewis is inarguably the most renowned mixed-race artist in American history. Her father was a free West Indian and her mother was part Chippewa and an artist in her own right. Edmonia’s groundbreaking sculpture was the gargantuan 3,000-pound work, The Death of Cleopatra. She devoted four years of her life to this marvel. This led her to Rome to rid the shackles of being a creative Black and a woman in the Reconstruction Era.
Named “Wildfire” at birth, she had an older half-brother named “Sunrise” (née Samuel) who led a very robust life as a participant in the California Gold Rush. He literally struck gold in the Rush and became comfortably wealthy. The Bozeman Magazine wrote, “Samuel oversaw her life and education from afar, making sure she was adequately cared for during his time in the west.” He paid for her to attend Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept Black women, and Natives. Racist attacks on Edmonia, including an assault by a white mob, forced her to flee to Boston where she began studying with the renowned sculptor Edward Brackett. From Boston, she studied in London, and Paris, before starting her masterwork in Rome in 1866. She told The Crystal Bridges Museum of Art,
“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
Her first major work, Forever Free (Morning of Liberty), depicts a Black man and woman kneeling at the moment of Emancipation. She also produced Old Arrow Maker, which represents a portion of the story from Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”—a poem that inspired several of her works. While most White artists characterized Native Americans as violent and uncivilized, Edmonia showed deep respect for her heritage. This sculpture, along with the magnificent Death of Cleopatra, resides in the Smithsonian. Museum curator Karen Lemmey described the piece as a “masterful marble sculpture…” The sculpture portrays Cleopatra in the aftermath of her death, as depicted in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.”
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