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(NewsNation) — Inside the halls of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one can find the marble works of art carved by Edmonia Lewis, the first sculptor of African American and Native descent to gain international recognition.
Born to a Haitian father and Native mother in upstate New York in 1844, Lewis was orphaned at a young age and grew up in her mother’s tribe. She spent her childhood fishing, swimming and making crafts.
She went to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1859 to study fine arts but was forced to leave before graduating over an accusation of poisoning. Oberlin College awarded her a posthumous degree in 2022.
She would later travel to Boston where she established herself as a professional artist and sculptor before moving to Rome in 1865 to continue her craft. Her works include the The Death of Cleopatra and Poor Cupid, both of which are on display alongside several others at the Smithsonian.
While sculptors usually hired workmen to carve their final piece, Lewis did all of her stonework.
Lewis returned to the United States in 1872 to exhibit works in San Francisco, and a year later she was invited by San Jose to display three works at the city’s Market Hall. Those were later given to the San Jose Public Library, where they can still be viewed today.
Lewis was honored with a United States Postal Service stamp in 2022 as part of the agency’s Black Heritage series. It features a portrait of Lewis based on a photograph by Augustus Marshall.
“Edmonia Lewis was a woman of great courage, talent and perseverance who broke through gender, race and class barriers,” Dr. Joshua D. Colin, the Postal Service’s chief retail and delivery officer, said at the time of commemoration. “The Postal Service is proud to honor this great American sculptor with a beautiful commemorative Forever stamp.”
Details about Edmonia’s life remain fuzzy, as she would often tailor stories of life to her life, according to the National Women’s History Museum. What is known is that she carved her own path to success in a field that at the time was dominated by men.
“It was very much a man’s world,” the Smithsonian’s sculpture curator Karen Lemmey told the Smithsonian Magazine in 2019. Lewis, Lemmey said, “really broke through every obstacle, and there’s still remarkably little known about her. … It’s only recently that the place and year of her death have come to light — 1907 London.”
Her most famous work, The Death of Cleopatra, took some four years to create and was criticized by some as as graphic and disturbing image of the moment when Cleopatra killed herself.
“The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant — and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art,” the artist William J. Clark Jr. wrote in 1878.
The sculpture was made famous at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it reportedly drew thousands of viewers but initially didn’t sell. It was later exhibited at the Chicago Interstate Exposition of 1878 before beginning a strange journey that would take it to a bar and a racetrack to serve as a grave marker for a horse.
The sculpture would move around several more times over the next 15 years before being donated to the Smithsonian in 1994.
Lewis disappeared from public life around the 1880s and died in London in 1907.