Edmonia Lewis (c. 1845 - 1907): #BHM #Art
- the first woman of African American and Native American ancestry to gain notoriety as a sculptor. Her first bust was of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a white Bostonian who led black troops in the Civil War. She sold copies of the bust, and was able with the proceeds to move to Rome. She became the first African American sculptor to celebrate Emancipation with The Freed Woman and Her Child and the immortal Forever Free. She created a famous bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also sculpting Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, John Brown, Senator Charles Sumner, Bishop B. W. Arnett, John Cardinal McCloskey, and many others. She shocked and mortified those who claimed African Americans lacked the capacity for intelligence and fine art by standing next to her works and explaining them for days on end. She was the first important female sculptor to take her work to California. At the 1876 Centennial exposition, she stunned the world with her sensational Death of Cleopatra, assuring her right to a place in history.
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(via stfusexists)
