Edmonia Lewis and the Iconography of Freedom

                                                    

Unsure even of her final resting place (England) until not long ago, we have long been confounded by Edmonia Lewis. She keeps us guessing: be it her upbringing as she claimed (among the Ojibwe people of her mother? or the free people of color of her Haitian-American father?) be it her name (among the Ojibwe she was “Wildfire,” at Oberlin college she was “Mary,” until she put that away for her own choice of “Edmonia”) date, even year of birth. For this, she lays claim to “on or about” July 4th 1844. It can be no accident that she centered a celebration of Independence for her first glimpse of the light of day, for this sculptress quite literally carved out an iconography of freedom. As the Civil War raged, abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote of her in 1864 “What she undertakes to do . . . she will do, though she has to cut through the heart of a mountain with a pen knife.”

Her work is as enigmatic as she. She began by busts of prominent anti-slavery figures in and around Boston until she decided to make her fate elsewhere, and, against all odds, expatriated to Rome in 1866. Here she began her iconography of liberty, with The Freedwoman on First Hearing of Her Liberty, and Forever Free. She places this utterly new formulation of the visuals of liberty firmly in the Neo-Classical canon of carrara marble and then takes up, again within that tradition, historical subjects, often biblical, such as Hagar. The Old Testament bondswoman of Sarah cast out into the desert might have obvious meaning for a woman who grew up as mixed-race in the antebellum US, even were it in the North. What is puzzling here is her choice to give Hagar European-style facial features. In that too, Edmonia Lewis keeps us guessing. For Kirsten Pai Buick it was perhaps a matter of refusing to become entirely autobiographical in her art, of refusing the easy answers of a sculptress asking hard questions about the nature of how to express freedom, or the difficulty of expressing the ideals of Victorian womanhood within the context of Emancipation. 

Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867

Edmonia Lewis, Hagar, 1875

The puzzles continue as she drew from her homeland imaginary in sculpting Hiawatha and the Arrow-maker and his Daughter. Still employing the Neo-Classical vocabulary of marble groups or busts, she takes these eminently American subjects and again gives them European facial traits. Is this once again denying commentators and critics the ease of collapsing her auto-biographically into her own creations? Facile interpretations of these works abound, continuing to see these iconographical choices as affirming her mother’s culture. For more sophisticated readings I suggest

Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire,, Durham & London, 2010

For a straight ahead biography of this fascinating figure see

Harry Henderson, The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis: A Narrative Biography, Esquiline Hill Press (December 30, 2013)