Understanding History and Society through Images, 1776-1914

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 14.01.10

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. School Details
  3. Strategies
  4. Background Information
  5. Specific sculptures
  6. Contemporary artists
  7. Classroom activities
  8. Bibliography
  9. Notes

Making Art against the Odds: The Triumph of Edmonia Lewis

Kimberly Kellog Towne

Published September 2014

Tools for this Unit:

Bibliography

""The Process of Sculpture", by Harriet Hosmer, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1864, pp. 734-737." UNZ.org. http://www.unz.org/Pub/AtlanticMonthly-1864dec-00734 (accessed July 30, 2014).

"ART/WRITE - The University of Arizona Museum of Art and Archive of Visual Arts." The University of Arizona Museum of Art and Archive of Visual Arts. http://www.artmuseum.arizona.edu/artwrite (accessed July 30, 2014).

This website has several resources and strategies for looking, talking and writing about art with students.

Addiss, Stephen, and Mary Erickson. Art history and education. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

This is a good reference for thinking about art history and education. It would be excellent for non-art teachers looking to incorporate art history into their classroom.

Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A history of African-American artists: from 1792 to the present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

An excellent reference on major African American artist, this book is an asset for teacher and student use.

Buick, Kirsten P.. "The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography." American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 4.

An article taken from the author's book on Edmonia Lewis.

Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the problem of art history's Black and Indian subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Starting as a dissertation, this is the most recent scholarship on Edmonia Lewis.

Cherry, Deborah. Painting women: Victorian women artists. London: Routledge, 1993.

Focusing on Victorian women artists, it is a good reference if one was interested in the subject.

Cherry, Deborah. Beyond the frame: feminism and visual culture, 1850-1900. London: Routledge, 2000.

Focusing on art and feminism, this interesting book would be a beneficial read for someone interested in the subject.

Cherry, Deborah. Art: history : visual : culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.

This is an interesting book on the connections between art, history and culture.

"Child of the fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the problem of art history's black and Indian subject." Choice Reviews Online 48, no. 02 (2010): 48-0671-48-0671.

Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. Sharing traditions: 5 Black artists in 19.-century America : [from the coll. of the National Museum of American Art]. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Pr., 1985.

This wonderful book explores the art and lives of five African American artists including Edmonia Lewis.

Holland, Juanita Marie. "Mary Edmonia Lewis's "minnehahah": Gender, Race, and the "Indian Maid"." Bulletin of the Detroit Insitiute of Arts 69, no. 1/2 (1995): 26-35.

"Home - Visual Thinking Strategies." Home - Visual Thinking Strategies. http://vtshome.org/ (accessed July 14, 2014).

"Lost and Found: The Strange Case of the Resurrection of Edmonia Lewis' "The Death of Cleopatra"." The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 13, no. Autumn (1996): 32-33.

This article explains the history of the sculpture.

Miller, Angela L., Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan Jay Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts. American encounters: art, history, and cultural identity. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc., 2008.

A must for an art classroom, this book is an art history textbook on American art.

Quarles, Benjamin. "A Sidelight on Edmonia Lewis." Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc 30, no. 1 (1945): 82-84.

Roland, Craig. "Looking at and Talking about Art with Kids." Artjunction. http://www.artjunction.org/archives/looking@art.pdf (accessed July 20, 2014).

This PDF discusses ways to look at and talk about art with students.

Salenius, Sirpa A.. "US-American New Women in Italy 1853-1870." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14, no. 1 (2012): 2-8.

"Sculptor's Death Date Unearthed: Edmonia Lewis Died in London in 1907." ArtfixDaily. http://www.artfixdaily.com/blogs/post/51-sculptors-death-unearthed-edmonia-lewis-died-in-london-in-1907 (accessed July 30, 2014).

Woods, Naurice Frank. "An African Queen at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 1876: Edmonia Lewis's." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 9, no. 1 (2008): 62-82.

This article discusses the sculpture's history.

Comments:

Marilyn Richardson

November 15, 2016 at 4:27 pm

More Info About Edmonia Lewis

Google: Edmonia Lewis, Marilyn Richardson for more information on Lewis's life, career, and sculpture

Kirsten Pai Buick

October 28, 2022 at 8:42 pm

oversimplification of my argument

I read this with great pleasure and interest. I think that this is a wonderful way to introduce students to Lewis’s work and to inspire other curiosities and a true model for exploration. However, my work on Lewis is vastly oversimplified. Of course her identity played a role in her work. She referenced it all the time—whether it was through Longfellow or her Catholicism or her figures based on enslavement, the Bible, history, etc. But those “identifications” (a more fluid way of understanding the seeming coherence of “identity”) are based on distances—Longfellow in lieu of direct references to her childhood; enslaved people though she was never enslaved. Lewis manipulated those identities that people could only narrowly comprehend. The author states: “This book, which began as a dissertation, argues that her work is more a reflection of the time period than her personal identity. Despite this being the most recent published work, I am not going to focus on the author's point of view. While certainly Edmonia Lewis' art was reflective of the context in which she was working, one cannot discount the impact her personal identity had on her subject choice and her work.” I was not arguing that her context was more important than her personal identity. My point was that her “personal identity” was never revealed by her. She used her deep understanding of context to make her dreams come true despite the limitations that the era set for her.

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