Edmonia Lewis Gets Her First Comprehensive Museum Survey
At the Peabody Essex Museum, “Said in Stone” is giving Edmonia Lewis the kind of institutional attention her career has long lacked. The exhibition is the first comprehensive show devoted to the late 19th-century sculptor, whose marble figures now appear together as a coherent body of work rather than as scattered survivals from a difficult life and an even more difficult art world.
Lewis, a Black and Indigenous woman who worked between the United States and Rome, built a practice that joined technical precision to historical argument. The exhibition makes that ambition visible. It places her sculptures in conversation with one another, revealing how often she returned to themes of emancipation, Indigenous identity, classical form, and Black self-definition.
Among the most significant works on view is Forever Free (1867), described in the article as the first formal visual representation of emancipation by a Black American artist. The sculpture’s freed man, chain raised in one hand, and the kneeling woman beside him give Lewis’s abolitionist vision a quiet force that still feels unusually direct. Rather than relying on spectacle, she uses restraint, balance, and gesture to make freedom legible.
Other works in the exhibition include Indian Combat (1868), Hiawatha (1868), Hagar in the Wilderness (1875), and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1864). Together, they show Lewis moving fluidly between literary subjects, biblical narrative, and Civil War memory. The result is not a single theme but a sustained inquiry into who gets represented, and how.
The exhibition also gestures toward the personal and cultural inheritance that shaped Lewis’s art, including her Ojibwe family background and the weaving traditions associated with her mother. That lineage matters here. It helps explain why Lewis’s sculptures feel so attentive to form as a vessel for memory, grief, and endurance.
“Said in Stone” will travel next to the Georgia Museum of Art, extending Lewis’s long-overdue visibility beyond Salem. For a sculptor who spent much of her career working against erasure, the exhibition offers something rare: scale, context, and historical clarity.
