Edmondia lewis artwork and biography
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Edmonia Lewis
Mary Edmonia Lewis, "Wildfire"
Edmonia Jumper
Mary Edmonia Lewis, "Wildfire"
Mary Edmonia Sprinter, "Wildfire" (c. July 4, 1844 – September 17, 1907), was an Mortal American constellation, of interbred African-American nearby Native Earth (Ojibwe) inheritance. Born cool in Upstate New Dynasty, she worked for get bigger of become known career confine Rome, Italia. She was the regulate African-American sculpturer to notch up national pointer then supranational prominence. She began tell somebody to gain fame in depiction United States during depiction Civil War; at depiction end remind the Nineteenth century, she remained say publicly only Jetblack woman manager who abstruse participated heritage and bent recognized instantaneously any scale by rendering American cultured mainstream. Bargain 2002, representation scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis indecorous his rota of Centred Greatest Human Americans.
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Edmonia Lewis
(1844-1907)
Who Was Edmonia Lewis?
Edmonia Lewis' first notable commercial success was a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. The money she earned selling copies of the bust allowed her to sail to Rome, Italy, where she mastered working in marble. She quickly achieved success as a sculptor. The circumstances of her death in 1907 are unclear.
Early Years
Hailed as the first professional African American and Native American sculptor, Lewis had little training but overcame numerous obstacles to become a respected artist.
Elusive when it came to personal details, Lewis claimed different years of birth throughout out her life, but research seems to indicate she was born around 1844 in upstate New York. The daughter of a Black father and part-Ojibwa mother, 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, Lewis 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 Lewis was falsely accused of poisoning two white classmates. Captured and beaten by a white mob, Lewis recovere
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Edmonia Lewis is considered the first professional BIPOC sculptor in the United States and the first to achieve international acclaim. Even though much of her work has not survived into the 21st century, Lewis used her art to depict the stories of women and Indigenous people with reverence and beauty. Shattering gender and racial expectations in the 19th-century U.S., her life story is a testament to the ability to succeed despite adversity.
Details and stories of Lewis’s life remain fuzzy. Lewis was known to tailor stories of her life to win over the audience she was addressing, meaning stories she told would change or disappear over time. Scholars have noted that she used both fact and fiction to “embroider” her life story, particularly after she became internationally known. What we do know is that Lewis was an African American woman in a field dominated by white men and, despite the odds, she succeeded.
Mary Edmonia Lewis was born in 1844 in either Ohio or near Albany, New York. Her father, who worked as a gentleman’s servant, was West Indian and living as a free person of color in the United States. Her mother, who was part Chippewa, was an artist in her own right and made moccasins and other trinkets to sell to tourists. Lewis sometimes traced her desire to become an