Edmonia Lewis
Edmonia Lewis (c. July 4, 1844 – September 17, 1907) was an American sculptor.
Quotes
[edit]- There is nothing so beautiful as the free forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities, if it were not for my passion for art.
- On nature in “Edmonia Lewis (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
- Some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don’t want that kind of praise…I had rather you would point out my defects, for that will teach me something.
- On the attention she preferred as an artist of color in “Sculptor Edmonia Lewis Shattered Gender and Race Expectations in 19th-Century America” in Smithsonian Magazine (2019 Aug 22)
- I have strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.
- On her sculpture “Hagar” [as quoted in “Making Art Against the Odds: The Triumph of Edmonia Lewis”] (Yale National Initiative)
- I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art-culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.
- On studying in Europe (as quoted in the book Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and gay history from the Puritans to Playland)
Quotes about
[edit]- Miss Edmonia Lewis among sculptors, Mrs. S. M. Douglass and Miss [Rebecca J.] Cole among physicians, Miss Ketchum among clerks, illustrate an aptitude and ability among colored women which, if cordially recognized and encouraged by colored men in their more matured experience in these directions, would be the beginning of an era of thought and effort among colored women creditable to them as a class, and highly promotive of the general well-being.
- Mary Ann Shadd, "Report on Woman's Labor," Proceedings of the Colored National Labor Convention (1870). Collected in Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist edited by Nneka D. Dennie (2024)
