The Decades-Long Quest to Find and Honor Edmonia Lewis’s Grave

honorthegods:

nativenews:

Edmonia Lewis, the first professional African-American sculptor, was born in Ohio or New York in 1843 or 1845. Her father was a free African-American and her mother Mississauga Ojibwe.

Orphaned before she was five, Lewis lived with her mother’s people until she was twelve years old. Lewis’s older brother, Sunrise, a gold miner in California, financed his sister’s early schooling in Albany, and also helped her to attend Oberlin College in Ohio in 1859.

Her career was interrupted when accused of poisoning, and although acquitted of the charge, she had to endure a highly publicized trial but also a severe beating by white vigilantes where she was left for dead.

Subsequently accused of stealing art supplies and not permitted to graduate from Oberlin, she traveled to Boston and established herself as a professional artist, studying with a local sculptor and creating portraits of famous antislavery heroes. Moving to Rome in 1865, she became involved with a group of American women sculptors and began to work in marble.

In addition to creating portrait heads, Lewis sculpted biblical scenes and figural works dealing with her Peoples and the oppression of Black people.

Most of Lewis’s sculptures have not survived. Portrait busts of abolitionists and patrons such as Anna Quincy Waterston, and subjects depicting her dual African-American and Native American ancestry were her specialty.

One of Edmonia Lewis’ works: Hiawatha’s Marriage, 1868. Marble; 29.5″ x 13.125″ x 13.125″. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.

Indian Combat, 1868. Marble; 30″ x 19″ x 14.3125″. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Old Arrow Maker, 1872. Marble; 21.5″ x 13.625 x 13.375″. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Little is available by way of documentation of Lewis’s early life, but the 19th-century press supplied a gripping narrative of her early years. Orphaned as a girl, she was “reared among the Indians” — her mother’s Ojibwe relations — and given the name Wildfire. She studied at Oberlin [where she would take her English name], but a claim that she had poisoned two students with Spanish Fly led her to cease her studies prematurely. Then she turned up in Boston, where the progressive whites who had been abolitionists before the Civil War arranged for her to be mentored by a local sculptor. Sales of a bust of Robert Gould Shaw, which she created in 1864, funded a one-way ticket to Europe, where she would spend the rest of her life. She eschewed the habit, common among her contemporaries, of using Italian artisans to do the actual marble-carving. Comparatively few of her works survive.

A 1901 census record revealed to Richardson that Edmonia Lewis had relocated from Rome to London, and subsequent research, with the aid of UK lawyer Scott Varland, uncovered Lewis’s will and burial records. Lewis died in Hammersmith Infirmary, in London, of Bright’s disease, a chronic and excruciating kidney ailment. From there, she was taken to the cemetery at Harrow Road.

In her will, Lewis identified herself as a “Spinster and Sculptor.” She asked for a dark walnut coffin, and that a notice of her death be printed in the Tablet, a British Roman Catholic publication. The resulting announcement — a curt sentence fragment — made no mention of her myriad accomplishments, and did not reach those who sought her across the sea. Until, over a century later, it found Richardson.

Richardson sees her research as part and parcel with the efforts of other black women scholars: after all, she noted, Alice Walker found Zora Neale Hurston’s grave, “out in the long grass.” “So I’ve become a cemetery sleuth,” she told me.

Until recently, the grave was unmarked: a slab of stone flush with the earth, overgrown with moss, one among many in the stone forest of St. Mary’s. Last year, however, the town where Lewis was born chose to reclaim its native daughter.

Restoring Edmonia Lewis’s grave in London and re-establishing her legacy:

as the town historian, which is how she (Bobbie Reno) first heard about Edmonia Lewis. She was so taken by the story that she decided to write and illustrate a book about Lewis — and discovered the stark fact of her unmarked grave.

Since then, Reno has taken up the cause — and, with the help of some crowdfunding, completed the task that Richardson began. With the permission of St. Mary’s Cemetery’s stewards, Reno set up a GoFundMe to hire a UK firm and create the grave marker.

Today, grave C350 is newly distinguished. Now, on black marble, a woman’s name is picked out in gold letters: “Edmonia Lewis, Sculptor, 1844-1907.”

This is good to know!

I posted last year about Lewis’ monument, Hygieia, Greek goddess of goddess of health, cleanliness, and health regimens, sculpted to mark the grave of Harriot Kezia Hunt (November 9, 1805 – January 2, 1875), the first female physician to practice medicine in Boston, located at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, here.