![]() However, her academic record at Central College (1856–fall 1858) has been located, and her grades, "conduct", and attendance were all exemplary. I was then sent to school for three years in, but was declared to be wild-they could do nothing with me. Until I was twelve years old I led this wandering life, fishing and swimming.and making moccasins. In a later interview, Lewis said that she left the school after three years, having been "declared to be wild." At McGrawville, Lewis met many of the leading activists who would become mentors, patrons, and possible subjects for her work as her artistic career developed. In 1856, Lewis enrolled in a pre-college program at New York Central College, a Baptist abolitionist school. Mills.īy the time she got to college, Lewis was economically privileged, because her older brother Samuel had made a fortune in the California gold rush and "supplied her every want anticipating her wishes after the style and manner of a person of ample income". ![]() In 1852, Samuel left for San Francisco, California, leaving Lewis in the care of a Captain S. During this time, Lewis went by her Native American name, Wildfire, while her brother was called Sunshine. Lewis and her aunts sold Ojibwe baskets and other items, such as moccasins and embroidered blouses, to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Buffalo. The children lived with their aunts near Niagara Falls, New York, for about four years. Samuel became a barber at age 12 after their father died. The family came to the United States when Samuel was a young child. Samuel was born in 1835 to his father of the same name, and his first wife, in Haiti. Her two maternal aunts adopted her and her older half-brother Samuel. ![]() Her half-brother Samuel, who is treated at some length in a history of Montana, said that their father was "a West Indian Frenchman", and his mother "part African and partly a descendant of the educated Narragansett Indians of New York state." (The Narragansett people are originally from Rhode Island.)īy the time Lewis reached the age of nine, both of her parents had died Samuel Lewis died in 1847 and Robert Benjamin Lewis in 1853. Other sources say her father was the writer on African Americans, Robert Benjamin Lewis. The first is Samuel Lewis, who was Afro-Haitian and worked as a valet (gentleman's servant). Two different African-American men are mentioned in different sources as being her father. She was an excellent weaver and craftswoman. Her mother, Catherine Mike Lewis, was African-Native American, of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent. Most of her girlhood was apparently spent in Newark, New Jersey. Life and career Early life Hiawatha, 1868, by Edmonia Lewis, inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha.Īccording to the American National Biography, reliable information about her early life is limited, and Lewis "was often inconsistent in interviews even with basic facts about her origins, preferring to present herself as the exotic product of a childhood spent roaming the forests with her mother's people." On official documents she variously gave 1842, 1844, and 1854 as her birth year. Her work is known for incorporating themes relating to Black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas into Neoclassical-style sculpture. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. J– September 17, 1907), was an American sculptor.īorn in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American ( Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" (c.
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