A new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, brings together 30 sculptures by Edmonia Lewis, the first African American and Native American sculptor to achieve international fame in the 19th century. Curated by Jeff Richmond (the museum's George Putnam Curator of American Art) and Sonia Harris of the Georgia Museum of Art, the show represents the largest collection of Lewis's works ever assembled in one place. The exhibition traces her journey from her Native American roots with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, through her early career in Civil War-era Boston where she met Frederick Douglass, to her thriving studio in Rome, where she employed nearly 20 assistants before her death in London in 1907.
This exhibition matters because it rescues a pioneering artist from historical obscurity—Lewis spent a century in an unmarked grave despite her international renown. The show highlights both her artistic achievements and the racial and gender barriers she overcame, including a Boston patron who withheld reference photographs because she deemed Lewis "unworthy" of sculpting a white abolitionist hero. By assembling the largest-ever grouping of her works, the exhibition provides a rare opportunity to reassess Lewis's legacy and underscores the growing scholarly and public interest in recovering overlooked artists of color from art history.