African American Artist's Art Work

African American Artist's Art Work

Introduction

One of the renowned and recognized African American artist Mary Edmonia Lewis has been selected to be studied in this paper. Past studies of African American art have generally focused on the ways in which black artists have advanced in a white-dominated art world using Western media (for example, oil on canvas) and conventions (for example, portrait painting). Africa's vital craft and ritual traditions, which had flourished for centuries and inform much African American art, are only now being recovered and integrated into the mainstream. Many African American artists experienced prejudice at home and a kind of awed curiosity abroad. Edmonia Lewis (1845-1911), of African and Native American descent, is regarded as the first professional black sculptor. Some of her works addressed African American themes, such as a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the first all-black regiment in the Civil War, and a Freedwoman.

Life of Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia LEWIS was born at Greenbush, near Albany, N.Y., of a Negro father and a Chippewa Indian mother. Little is known of her background or early life; her father, according to an English interviewer, was “a gentleman's servant” (Athenaeum, Mar. 3, 1866, p. 302). Her mother, it is said, died when she was three years old and her father a year later. Edmonia grew up among the Chippe was (possibly near Niagara Falls, where her mother's sister was living in 1869), leading an outdoor life and making baskets and embroidered moccasins. Her Indian name was Wildfire. With the help of her only brother, Sunrise, who had been to an Indian school and had joined the California gold rush, she was able to attend Oberlin College, where she enrolled as Mary Edmonia Lewis in the preparatory department (1859-60) and then in the college itself (1860-62). In January 1862 she was accused of poisoning two white schoolmates; and although she was released for insufficient evidence after an intensive pretrial hearing, she left Oberlin soon afterward and settled in Boston. She had always, as she told the author Lydia Maria Child, “wanted to make the forms of things”; but it was the statue of Benjamin Franklin before Boston's City Hall that reportedly stirred her passionate interest in sculpture. She sought the aid of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who sent her to the studio of a local sculptor, Edmund Brackett. Pleased with a free copy she made of a cast of a woman's hand; Brackett gave her a series of study assignments in modeling technique. Thereafter she was her own teacher.

Her first work, a medallion of the head of John Brown which she advertised in Garrison's Liberator beginning Jan. 29, 1864, won the praise of Boston friends. She scored a broader success later in 1864 when she modeled from photographs a bust of the Civil War hero Col. Robert Gould Shaw, who had been killed in action while commanding the first regiment of colored troops to be called into the Union ...