At Mount Auburn Cemetery, on the Cambridge-Watertown line, there’s a hill at the bend of a path. On top is a sculpture that marks the family plot of Dr. Harriet Hunt, the first woman to practice medicine professionally.
The sculpture depicts Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health and hygiene. Time and the harsh New England elements have weathered away her face, and some green lichen is slowly spreading across the marble. But there’s still evidence of the chisel marks made by the person who sculpted Hygeia — an artist named Edmonia Lewis.
“ The sculpture is carved out of beautiful, soft, white Italian Carrara marble,” said Meg Winslow, curator at Mount Auburn Cemetery. “ One thing that’s very unusual about Hygeia is that no one knew it was important because we didn’t have any archives about the statue.”
It’s not a surprising fact. Lewis rose to fame in the late 19th century as the first renowned Black and Indigenous sculptor. But after her death and burial in an unmarked grave in 1907, she veritably disappeared from history.
Lewis’s work and life are now the subject of a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum. “Edmonia Lewis: Said In Stone” showcases her sculptures and other artifacts that were contemporary in her lifetime, like paintings and Ojibwe artisan wares.
”We’ve realized that Edmonia Lewis is not really a household name to many people,” said PEM curator Jeffrey Richmond-Moll. “We want to bring visitors into that kind of direct encounter with her and her incredible story.”
The exhibition is organized into sections that give viewers a detailed look into different aspects of Lewis’ life, including her time spent among abolitionists and the Black community in Boston and her indigenous heritage and upbringing.
Born to a Black father and a mother who was part of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Lewis was orphaned young and raised by her mother’s family. She would have likely encountered things like the Ojibwe bowls and a walking staff made by a Haudenosaunee sculptor that are included in the exhibit. The objects are anchored by Lewis’s sculpture depicting the marriage of Ojibwe warrior, Hiawatha.
“She learns from her maternal family how to make bead work and basketry and moccasins and quill work,” said Richmond-Moll. “She’s exposed to this really rich visual material world of First Nations art from childhood and this is where her artistic and creative vision begins.”
That vision would lead Lewis to Boston after she met Frederick Douglass at Oberlin College. She arrived in the city in 1863 at only 19 years old, and worked out of a downtown studio. Just a year later, she debuted her sculptures at the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission fair.
“She begins making connections with abolitionists and social reformers in the city.” This community-building was important, said Richmond-Moll, because it “helped form her and her work.”
A portion of “Said in Stone” is devoted to Lewis’s sculpture of a man and woman called “Forever Free.” The figures have freed themselves from the bonds of slavery.
“I think this is the first sculpture by a Black artist in the United States to celebrate emancipation,” said Richmond-Moll. “And more importantly, they are the agents in their own liberation, which is so different from the sort of imagery you would see at the time around abolition.”
After gaining support in Boston, Lewis traveled to Rome and continued her work there. The move put her at the center of the Neoclassical world, a popular style at the time that drew inspiration from ancient Greece. The movement produced art that had a sense of order, proportion and an idealization of the human form.
“But just because she’s a Neoclassical sculptor doesn’t mean that she is always rooted in the past,” Richmond-Moll pointed out. “ She’s using that artistic language to make an intervention in her own contemporary moment.”
Lewis made work for decades, but the Neoclassical style fell out of fashion in the latter part of the 19th century. She moved to London, where she died and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1907. Lewis’ grave was eventually identified in 2017, though certain artworks are still lost. The curators of “Said in Stone” spent years going through archival and scholarly material on Lewis. Eventually, Richmond-Moll and his team were able to find one of Lewis’ lost works.
“Two sculptures that she showed in fall 1864 were thought to have been lost. We found a bust of Robert Gould Shaw that has belonged for over a century to the Massachusetts National Guard.”
Richmond-Moll said “Said in Stone” has been a process of recovery as much as it is a celebration of Lewis’ art. “There are only bits and pieces of her own voice in sources from her own lifetime.”
By bringing visitors into a direct encounter with Lewis and the worlds that shaped her, “Said in Stone” helps flesh out her story, bringing the traces of her together to try to compile a more nuanced picture of who she was.
There’s still more history to uncover.
But Richmond-Moll hopes this exhibit is a step towards never losing Lewis to time again.
“Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum through June 7.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misstated the location of Mount Auburn Cemetery. We regret the error.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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