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Installation view of Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\nSALEM, Mass. \u2014 \u201cSometimes the times were dark and the outlook was lonesome, but where there is a will, there is a way,\u201d the Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis once said. The quotation, now printed and spotlit on a dark blue wall in the exhibition Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone, continues, \u201cThat is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is bound to respect them for what they have accomplished.\u201d Lewis \u2014 who was born in Greenbush, New York, in 1844 and died in London in 1907 \u2014 is paid such respect in her first major retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum, held over a century after the artist\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art, the extensively researched exhibition tells an expansive narrative of the artist\u2019s sculpture practice and legacy, displaying 30 of Lewis\u2019s Neoclassical white marble sculptures alongside a plethora of archival materials and works by other artists. One of the strongest elements of Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone is that the curatorial framework allows for Lewis to be understood simultaneously as a Black and Indigenous artist without conflating the two identities. Indeed, each quite literally occupies its own space in the exhibition: Four thematic rooms \u2014 \u201cAntislavery and Emancipation,\u201d \u201cIndigenous Artistic Worlds,\u201d \u201cthe Studios of Rome,\u201d and \u201cReligion, Mythology, Transcendence\u201d \u2014 are in conversation with one another and designated by different colors of wall paint. Through collaboration with Black and Native scholars, the groundbreaking exhibition is the first of its kind to present Lewis\u2019s work in dialogue with both of her ancestries.<\/p>\n
Installation view of Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n
Text is key to this exhibition\u2019s storytelling, especially considering how many of the works are not by Lewis herself. Before viewing the art, visitors can read a signed statement by the curators explaining that Lewis was likely the daughter of Richard Lewis, a free Black man, and Margaret Groat Mike, a Mississauga-Tuscarora woman. The statement further shares that while archival evidence remains inconclusive about her parentage, extensive research was conducted on Lewis\u2019s upbringing with her mother\u2019s family, who were Mississaugas of the Credit, an Anishinaabe nation in present-day Ontario near the US-Canadian border.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1865, Lewis moved from Boston to Rome \u2014 a premier hub for American Neoclassical sculptors from the late 1820s to the mid-1870s \u2014 and worked there as a sculptor until the early 1890s, when she moved to London. The exhibition informs visitors that within a few years of her arrival in Italy, Lewis was the first woman artist of Black and Indigenous descent to achieve widespread international acclaim. \u201cI was practically driven to Rome,\u201d Lewis explained, because \u201cthe land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewis’s voice is amplified across the exhibition, as she is quoted in vinyl lettering on the walls in many of its rooms. This curatorial decision brings Lewis in as narrator of her own practice and life, as opposed to speaking with an omnipresent museum perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Edmonia Lewis, “Forever Free” (1867) (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n
While abroad, Lewis\u2019s practice did not shy away from activism; her work commented on current American political events. The first carved marble sculpture by Lewis that exhibition-goers encounter is \u201cForever Free\u201d (1867), in which a man stands upright and looks up with his fist in the air. Broken shackles hang from his arm as a woman kneels beside him with clasped hands, also looking upward. \u201cForever Free\u201d was the first sculpture by a Black American artist to celebrate Emancipation. Made in Rome, the composition borrows visual elements from ancient Greco-Roman marble statuary. Throughout her work, Lewis used the language of Neoclassical sculpture to spread her message while also borrowing imagery from her own time. For example, the exhibition links the kneeling woman in \u201cForever Free\u201d to a similar image printed on the copper token “Am I Not a Woman & A Sister,”<\/a> produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a 1863 newspaper printing of the Emancipation Proclamation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Displayed alongside 18th-century, 19th-century, and contemporary Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe art, \u201cHiawatha\u2019s Marriage\u201d (modeled 1866, carved 1870) is displayed in another room. In response to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s popular poem of 1855, \u201cThe Song of Hiawatha,\u201d Lewis carved the union of Dakota woman Minnehaha and Ojibwe warrior Hiawatha. In this work, the synchronized contrapposto of Minnehaha and Hiawatha insinuates equal agency, further emphasized as the two appear to shake hands as equals. The label for the work points out that while other artists portrayed the couple with Hiawatha leading Minnehaha away from her home or Hiawatha\u2019s figure dominating a passive Minnehaha, Lewis carved the pair with an Indigenous feminist sensibility, the figures\u2019 stances signalling intertribal diplomacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Lewis\u2019s best-known work, \u201cThe Death of Cleopatra<\/a>\u201d (1876), the artist carved Cleopatra in her feminist Neoclassical mode, depicting her as an honorable leader in death. Gripping the snake that fatally bit her to avoid bondage by the Roman Empire, Cleopatra\u2019s corpse sinks in a chair. First debuted at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, the work was thought to be lost but eventually rediscovered. Due to its fragility, it is absent from the exhibition and instead replaced with a cardboard replica. While the replica is somewhat disappointing in its lack of depth and presence, it is a reflection of the reality that Lewis\u2019s work did not receive the proper conservation that it deserved for many years. In a subsection titled \u201cBlack Cultural Memory,\u201d the exhibition points to how, for the past 150 years, Black women\u2019s organizations and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) advocated for Lewis\u2019s work and preserved her legacy. Other works by Lewis remain lost, pointing to the importance of this research today.<\/p>\n The exhibition closes by demonstrating Lewis\u2019s legacy in a powerful work by Gisela Torres, a London-based interdisciplinary artist of Afro-Cuban descent who feels a deep \u201cpsychic connection\u201d with the sculptor. In a video work titled \u201cReverie and Slumber\u201d (2020), Torres dreams of Lewis. Video footage of Rome is projected on plaster casts of Torres’s head, overlaid with audio of the artist singing Peggy Lee\u2019s 1969 song \u201cIs That All There Is?\u201d and whispering names of other Black women sculptors. (These names include the Black and Indigenous sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890\u20131960), whose first museum survey<\/a> toured in 2025.) \u201cReverie and Slumber\u201d is from Torres\u2019s ongoing reclamation series Looking for Edmonia (Self-Portrait<\/a>) (2018\u2013present), which began after she read an article<\/a> about the discovery of Lewis\u2019s unmarked grave in a London cemetery where she regularly walked.\u00a0<\/p>\n Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone\u2019s contribution lies not just in its carefully curated presentation of her artworks, but also in its critical research on the artist and her life, demonstrating how her legacy was carried forward by the Black community. It is deeply moving. I imagine that, as the exhibition travels to two other museums, it will reach other contemporary artists who, like Torres, follow in Lewis\u2019s footsteps.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/image-74-1.png\")
Edmonia Lewis, \u201cHiawatha\u2019s Marriage\u201d (modeled 1866, carved 1870) (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/image-75.png\")
Replica of Edmonia Lewis, \u201cThe Death of Cleopatra\u201d (1876) (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/image-76.png\")
Installation view of Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone (photo Sh\u00e1\u0144d\u00ed\u00edn Brown\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n