SYMHC Classics: Edmonia Lewis

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The United States Postal Service has just released a new stamp honoring sculptor and Monia Lewis. It is the forty five stamp in the USPS Black Heritage series. We covered Louis on the show on January eleven, so we're bringing that episode into folks feeds today, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's subject. There's a little bit of art history. It's not a little bit, it's quite a bit of ourt history, but also it ties into abolitionist history. It's also an interesting study of identity and like public presentation, UH. And it also touches on a particularly long and circuitous path that a specific piece of art can sometimes go on before finding its way to the safety of a museum collection. So we're talking today about UH sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Typically, when we're talking about a person as the subject of a podcast, we start with the early life, with their birth and what we know about their parents. And this is one of those cases where it's tricky to do that because Edmonia spoke very little about her childhood and even gave some varying and inconsistent information about her childhood throughout her life. Yeah, this is one of those cases where the subject kind of blurred the picture a little bit themselves. And we'll talk about why she might have done that later on in the episode. But estimates put her birth most likely sometime in eighteen forty eight eighty five UH in upstate New York or possibly Ohio. I've also seen it suggested that it could even have been New Jersey uh. And she was born as Mary Edmonia Lewis, and her father was from the Ribbean and her mother was part of Jibway, and after her parents died when she was still very young she was possibly not even five years old at the time, it was her mother's family that raised her. The tribe that her mother had been part of was nomadic, and Lewis, who went by the name Wildfire when she was among her Native American ken, lived that life until the age of twelve. She also had an older brother named Samuel, who was also known as Sunrise, and her brother was more than a decade older than she was. In the eighteen forties, he left his relatives in the eastern United States to pursue gold mining in California, who was reasonably successful at it. And it was because of her brother's success that Wildfire left the nomadic life of her tribal family to attend school. Samuel actually paid for her to attend a school in New York, and eventually, in eighteen fifty nine, Edmonia enrolled at the Young Ladies Preparatory department of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and this was also paid or by her older brother, and it was during this time that she dropped using the name Wildfire completely and switched entirely to Edmonia. She also kind of abandoned her first name Mary. This is a significant point in her life as the abolitionist movement was very active at Oberlin and it really impacted her as a young student. But two other important things also happened to Edmonia during her college education, both good and bad. One was that she developed into a skilled sketch artist, and the other is that she was accused of poisoning two other young women at the college who were her roommates with Spanish Fly. According to her accusers, Edmonia served the two of them mulled wine before they went out for a sleigh ride with two young men, and while the young women were out on their date, both of them became violently ill. This accusation caused an immediate rift in the culture of Oberlin. The school was dedicated to aggressive causes and social justice, and prided itself on admitting African Americans and women since the eighteen thirties. The two girls Edmonia had allegedly poisoned were white, and a white vigilante mob forms to punish Louis. They seized her and beat her, and then left her for dead in a field. When she appeared in court weeks later, she had a shattered collar bone and needed crutches to walk. Her attackers were never brought to justice. Edmonia's lawyer, John Mercer Langston, who went on to great fame himself, had argued that her roommate's stomach contents were never tested for poisons, so that the entire accusation was really hearsay and she was acquitted. But it was not the end of her troubles at the school. Her reputation was really deeply damaged by scandal. Uh there. I read some accounts that suggested that basically she couldn't walk anywhere without people whispering about her, which I can only imagine had to be terribly demoralizing. And she was later accused of stealing art material and she wasn't allowed to register for her final term or graduate as a consequence, and those charges were dropped again for lack of evidence, but she still was not allowed to complete her degree. This really reminds me of our episode on Molly Spotted Elk Yeah the Performer, and how when she was working at a camp where the girls she was working with really loved her, but and then she had all of these accusations as the only Indigenous person working at the camp that seemed like we're probably false and made against her, not for any real evidence. It's very very parallel. So through the financial assistance of her brother once more, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and while Oberlin had exposed her to her art potential and to the abolitionist movement, Boston really built on that exposure with a lot of new connections. She met abolitionists and journalist William Lloyd Garrison and the two became close friends. She also met sculptor Edward A. Brackett, via an introduction that Garrison made between the two of them. Yeah, So, just as a little bit of context on those two men. William Lloyd Garrison was the publisher of The Liberator, which was an anti slavery paper that ran from eighteen thirty one until the end of the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. And Edward Augustus Brackett, who he had introduced in Monia too, was a self taught sculptor, very well known for busts and dramatic concepts, including a marble piece that he carved depicting a drowned woman and her baby. He also served in the Civil War, but then in the eighteen seventies he left behind his career in art to head up the Massachusetts Fish and Game Commission. So also very fascinating men in and of themselves that could be podcast subjects in the future. Through her friendship with Brackett and Monia began to sculpt. He served as a teacher and a mentor to her. In this new medium. She started creating clay and plaster medallions representing abolitionist leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips and John Brown, and she earned both acclaim and some commercial benefit for her work in the early eighteen sixties. Yes, she is one of those cases where she really was able to make a living for herself with her art, and her rapid rise to fame came from a piece that she did in eighteen sixty four, which was a bust of Colonel Robert Shaw. So the colonel, in case you do not recognize that name, was the white Union soldier who led the fifty fourth Massachusetts that was the first all black regiment in the Northeast and one of the first all black regiments in the war. He also led a wage boycott to protest the lesser pay that black soldiers received compared to white soldiers. Uh and Shaw died in battle at Fort Wagner in July of eighteen sixty three, and so he kind of had this very heroic image. So this bust was incredibly popular. Lewis made so much money selling copies of it that she was able to pay her way to travel to Europe. She toured multiple cities, including London, Paris, and Florence. But though it seemed briefly Florence would be her new home in Europe, she wound up settling in Rome, and in eighteen sixty five she rented a studio there adjacent to the Piazza Barberini. And Rome was a fairly natural choice at the time. It was a haven for a number of artists ex pats uh and it was a particularly attractive location for sculptors to set up studios because of the ready availability of white marble. Additionally, there was an abundance of skilled stone cutters in Rome who could take an artist plaster or wax model and copy that work into marble. And as a sculptor studying the neo classical style that was popular among the city's other sculptors at the time, they really expanded and refined Louis's skills. But though she had access to skilled laborers to assist in her work, she really didn't engage many. There are a couple of theories as to why she opted to go the more difficult route in creating marble pieces. For one, she didn't have a lot of extra money to pay for other people's work, but for another, she was concerned about debate about the purity of a work that had been copied onto marble. By other workers who weren't the artist. One of her friends had already faced criticism that her work was really the artistry of Rome's workmen rather than her own artistic work. And Amonia really quickly picked up Italian and she settled into Roman culture, and she also made some very close friends, one of which we just mentioned. They were both American women who were also living in the city. One was sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who was the person that had faced that criticism that her work was not her own, and the other was actress Charlotte Cushman. And the three women were part of a larger group of women artists in Italy at the time that Henry James once described as quote that strange sisterhood of American lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the Seven Hills of Rome in a white Marmorian flock. We'll talk about some of the work that Edmonia Lewis created while living in Rome next, but before we do, we will pause for a word from of our sponsors. As Louis continued to create in her new home in Europe, her art reflected themes of her deeply held religious beliefs, as well as references to the lives of African Americans, though it was certainly not confined exclusively to those subjects. This was a period of great productivity for Lewis, although unfortunately many of her works have not survived and they are lost forever. But after she had moved to Rome, she also traveled back and forth to the United States pretty frequently to showcase and sell her original works as well as plaster copies. One of the interesting pieces she created during this time was a copy of Michelangelo's Moses. She made this and other copies of classical sculptures in order to study them and improve her technique. Yeah. This I may be completely naive. This sort of blows my mind because her copy is quite good, and I just to me, it seems amazing that people could just make copies of such a beautiful piece and and do it in uh, you know, pretty good style. Uh So. In eighteen sixty six she also began a series of sculptures featuring Native Americans that were inspired by the Longfellow poem The Song of Hiawatha. She created a sculpture titled the Old Arrowmaker first, and you'll also see this work listed with variations in the title such as the Old Indian Arrowmaker and his Daughter or simply Arrowmaker. And this piece features a Native American man and his daughter as he teaches her how to make arrows, and that piece is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. On May twenty one of two thousand nine, another sculpture in the Hiawatha series, The Marriage of Hiawatha, sold at auction for three hundred and fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited her studio in Rome to sit for a bust, and it's likely that he saw some of these sculptures that his works had inspired. He was among many many people who flocked to Edmonia's studio. She became a very popular figure in the art world in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a really devoted fan base, and and many prominent people visited her to have their likenesses sculpted. Yeah, it's definitely one of those things that it's sort of hard, I think, I know, for me when doing the research to really it took me a while to realize, like, oh, she was famous, Like you tend to think of art kind of doing a artist doing their thing on their own in their studios and they sell works that go out. But people really did like sort of have this cult of celebrity around her, which to me is sort of fascinating. So she also created an anti slavery piece in eighteen sixty seven which is titled Forever Free, and it shows a man and woman breaking free of their bonds, and that particular sculpture is now part of the collection of Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. She did several chair and pieces in a series, including a Wake Sleep and Poor Cupid Awaken a Sleep. Both feature would appear to be the same to turibic infants, and they are very similar except for the fact that they're awake or asleep. Poor Cupid is a depiction of the cherub reaching for a rose in the ground, but his hand has been ensnared in a trap. The expression on cupid space is not a pained grimace, but he looks more like petulantly irritated. Awaken a Sleep or both in the San Jose Public Library, and Poor Cupid is in the Smithsonian's collection. I seriously love the expression on Cupid's face. In that one, like he just looks so bothered. It's a really really lovely capture of emotion. Uh and funny and money. And Lewis continued to create busts as well. Those are really like a pretty standard way to keep money flowing in, and she made several of them of prominent public figures, including President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant. The end of Edmonia Lewis's life story is a lot like it's beginning. It's kind of hazy. It was long believed that she had lived out the remainder of her years in Italy, but in fact she died in London, England, in nineteen o seven. This is pretty new information. It was un unearthed by historian Maryland Richardson through diligent efforts at tracking down her grave and records of her final years. For a long time, her year of death was completely inconsistent in any source material, and her place of death was pretty much assumed to be Rome. Yeah. Maryland Richardson has done a lot of work uh studying in Monia Lewis's life and has just a broad broad scope of revelatory information uh. And as the eighteen hundreds ended. The neo classical style that Lewis had been so skilled in was falling out of favor, and Rome had really been surpassed by Paris as the vogue city for artists. So we know that by nineteen o one, according to census records, Lewis had moved to London already she died, it turned out of kidney disease. Church records indicate that Lewis was laid to rest in London's St Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery for a fee of five pounds fifty two pence according to her final wishes. Her death was announced only in a British Roman Catholic bulletin called Tablet, and that posting made no mention of her art career. Her will listed Lewis as a sculptor and spinster. And one of the more fascinating aspects of Lewis as a historical figure is her legacy as a Native American slash African American sculptor. It's one of those things where if you just look up her name, that's kind of like the very brief blurb you'll see like America's first prominent Native American African American sculptor. But like her nebulous origin story, there's actually a great deal about her that's unclear, and this identity becomes very interesting and shifts a little bit, and it seems, at least in part to be due to a degree of shrewdness on her part. She was pretty comfortable allowing press coverage of her work during her life to characterize her based largely on that Native American or African American heritage, but ignoring the fact that she was well educated and really quite worldly. In an interview with The Toast In historian Marilyn Richardson said of Edmonia Lewis quote, she worked both sides of the street, depending on her audience and her patrons. She emphasized her blackness or her her Native American origins. She was very savvy about how to keep her identity and play and this portrayal of her in the press at the time as something of a novelty of underkind may have helped elevate her visibility as an artist. So that was no small feat for a woman of color in the eighteen hundreds. And additionally, press coverage at the time that spoke of her as this sort of mysterious, exotic, almost childlike creature who had suddenly appeared on the European art scene meant that her previous scandals at school could pretty much go mentioned. It was like she had divorced herself from that life and was creating this new identity for her public persona. Next up, we'll talk about one of Lewis's most important works, which has its own unique history, But first we'll have another quick pause for a word from a sponsor. One of Edmonia Lewis's largest sculptures, and somebody even argue her most important, was a piece titled The Death of Cleopatra, which weighed a whopping two tons, and it depicts the Egyptian queen in the moments after her suicide, still seated on her throne. And while it was not uncommon for artists to represent Cleopatra in the moments before her death, Lewis's realistic representation of the actual death was actually considered somewhat distasteful by some critics. But in eighteen seventy six, soon after its completion, The Death of Cleopatra was shown at the Philadelphia Exposition to a great critical reception, and shown again in eighteen seventy eight in Chicago. At the Expo, it was one of five sculptures on display, but it really stood out. It was called quote, the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section by J. S. Ingram and his books. His book about the Expo's Art Offerings Centennial Exposition described and illustrated artist William J. Clark Jr. Wrote of the Cleopatra statue in quote, this was not a beautiful work, but it was a very original and very striking one. Cleopatra is seated in a chair, the poison of the asp has done its work, and the queen is dead. The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent. And it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art. Unfortunately, when Edmonia returned to Rome, the Death of Cleopatra had to stay behind in the United States, because while she hadn't sold it, she also couldn't afford the return shipping costs this enormous work of art. We have talked before about how it can be quite difficult to move large sculptures across an ocean. Uh and it went into storage and after Edmonia left it in the US, this piece had an interesting life. It first reappeared as a piece of decor in a Chicago saloon on Clark Street in and then at some point it ended up in the possession of a gambler named Blind John Condom, who installed the marble piece at a racetrack in Forest Park, Illinois. The massive work sat on top of a horse's grave. The horse had been named Cleopatra, and when the land there was purchased by the U. S. Navy to become military housing, the statue remained kind of place. A covenant in the properties deed that step that stipulated that the horse's grave and its impressive, impressive statue had to stay there undisturbed. When the property was later purchased by the Edmere Construction Company to build a new shopping mall, the statue finally moved. They did not care about that covenant apparently, but this time the statue just sat in a workyard and was more or less forgotten. Some years later, a sister of fire chief named Harold Adams was inspecting the property and saw this Cleopatrick statue. He was taken with its beauty and wanted to help make sure it wasn't completely lost the time, so first he moved at the higher ground in the yard. He also wanted to try to clean up the sculpture because there was graffiti on it, so his son's Scout Troupe painted over this graffiti with white latex paint. Adams later told the Chicago Tribune that they did so quote so she'd look decent until somebody came along he would know better what to do for her. And over the course of a decade, Adams really did try to kind of find a way to get this statue into a more proper setting. He placed notices in the paper, and sometimes the paper would cover his work as like a special interest story, and he did this hoping someone would know about its past and come forward to help. And eventually a few people did start to share in for nation about the sculptures time as a grave marker, and this got the attention of the Forest Park Historical Society. The historical group took possession of the statue in the nineteen eighties and they moved her to a shopping mall storage area, and then in the president of the Historical Society a dentist named Frank Orland reached out to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for any possible information about the artist because her name was carved in the back of the sculpture. The museum connected with Marilyn Richardson, who had been researching and Monia Lewis, and gave the historian Orlans phone number. Initially, Orland didn't return her calls. Sir Richardson flew to Chicago to find him. He allowed her to see the statue still in the Forest Park Mall storeroom right along with all the seasonal decorations, and initially it seemed like there was some tension between them. While the Forest Park Historical Society felt that the marble piece was part of their history, Richardson worked to convince Orland and his colleagues the statute is import in the larger context of American art history. Yeah, it's kind of funny. There's one article that will be in the show notes that was one of my sources, where it is a contemporary article from when this discovery had really come to light and they were trying to figure out what was going to happen with it, and the quotes from each of them are like these very stilted I don't want to do what they want to do. Like he very clearly doesn't want somebody coming in and telling the historical society what to do with They're fine, and she is very concerned that they don't appreciate what this piece of art is. It's quite quite uh. Yeah, it's very carefully worded, but you can tell there is tension going on. But eventually the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Museum came into the picture. George Gurney, the American Art Museum sculpture expert, advocated on behalf of the Smithsonian to assure Orland that the museum really would be the best home for Lewis's historically significant work, and the Smithsonian was finally allowed to take possession of the piece and it was restored for display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Loose Foundation Center, where it remains. This restoration was intensive and it cost thirty thousand dollars. There's only one existing photograph of the work and its original condition to work from, and several pieces of the sculpture had broken off. Several fingers on Cleopatra's right hand had to be replaced, as well as the asp that claimed her life and the sandals on her feet. Restoration work was carried out with extreme care and a manner that can be reversed and edited should better source material come about about what this sculpture looked like in its original state. And and now it still sits in the Smithsonian's collection, which I love. Uh. It's a really beautiful and it is very striking sculpture. Uh. And today Oberlin College, where Edmonia went to school, is actually home to the Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. The center is, according to its website quote, a collection of students, staff, and administrators who strive to transform existing systems of oppression based on sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, age ability, size, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and language. Lewis's own sexual orientation remains kind of nebulous, Similarly to her early and last years of her life. She was rumored during her life to have had romantic relationship with the women, but these claims really are really very difficult to substantiate. One way or the other. Accounts of her life will sometimes suggest that this whole poisoning incident that she was accused of in college was actually an instance of her attempting to use authorities, which is Spanish fly and the hopes of catalyzing a sexual encounter with her roommates and her close knit group of female friends in Italy is similarly hinted at as being sexual in nature. But while she never married or seemed to have any publicly known relationships of any kind, and she sometimes dressed in men clothing, she never identified on the record in any particular way. Yeah, So it's one of those cases where I know she is often she does often show up in like lgbt lgbt Q histories um as as an artist that they would claim as their own, which is great that she's getting exposure, but she never you know, we usually don't like to assign any sort of sexual identity to someone after they are no longer with us to speak for themselves. Right. Well, we've we've we've had some like episodes and listener males before we've talked about how like it's really important to talk about the broad spectrum of human relationships and history and identities and how people have lived their lives. But at the same time, like it's I think really important to both of us not to just assign people identities. Yeah, I don't want to assume anything. I mean, it's there could be any number of of points on the spect room where she was, uh, And since she was not willing to give up that information, the rest is conjecture, so certainly possible. But I would not claim anything is fact because we just don't know. And that is said Monia Lewis who She's one of those those people that I had in the back of my mind for a long time but never actually put her on a list, and I don't know why. And then I was doing research for another thing and I stumbled across her and I had that moment of why have we not done her? On the podcast? Well, I had the opposite, like, even even though uh, I don't consider myself to be like completely ignorant about art, it was not a name I really recognized. And then I googled her and went, oh, this seems awesome. Yeah, And it is one of those things that makes you It makes me anyway think about kind of how easily people are lost to the passage of time. Because she was very fame in the eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, so for her to be a name that people don't always know now, it's a very interesting transition to have happened. And the sculptures there's there are photos of a lot of her sculptures online and they are beautiful. Yeah there, I mean, her marble work is just so striking. Like I said, that expression on Cupid gets me every time. Uh it says sixty chuckle. It's very fun. I like that he looks really your ta Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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