Edmonia Lewis Was the Earliest Known Black Artist to Show Emancipation
The Edmonia Lewis exhibition “Said in Stone,” currently at the Peabody Essex Museum, marks the first time that the tremendous late 19th-century sculptor has been featured in a comprehensive show of her own. More than a hundred years after unformed marble passed through her hands and into human form, her works are at long last assembled together to speak as a kind of family. As such, the museum serves as a space of historical vindication for an artist who struggled, rock hammer in hand, against mountainous odds. The show brims with stories that once chiseled their way out of one determined Black, Indigenous woman’s heart and hands. Related Articles I’m only a poet who stumbled upon her story a little over a decade ago. I’d read about the artist, also named Wildfire, who reached inside the earth to grapple and grind with her own understanding of history and consequence. The girl who grew up with Ojibwe family weaving, her mother’s traditional patterns traced into her consciousness. The young woman who sojourned to Oberlin College, where …
