Hiawatha
White Marble, 1868

Mary Edmonia Lewis born in the northeast around 1845, was the first African American of either gender to be documented as a professional sculptor. She was born to the parentage of a free African American father and a Chippewa mother.
Orphaned at the age of four she lived with her mother’s tribe until she was twelve. A few years later her brother, a gold miner in California, financed her education at Oberlin College in Ohio. It was at Oberlin that Mary shed her Chippewa name “Wildfire” and took the name Mary Edmonia Lewis. At the school, Lewis was accused of theft and trying to poison two classmates. Although she was acquitted of both charges, she was not allowed to graduate. She left Oberlin for Boston in 1863, where she met portrait sculptor Edward Brackett, under whose instruction she began to produce portrait busts of well known abolitionists John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw. By selling these busts, she financed her trip to Europe, finally settling in Rome in 1865. Little details about her life after 1865 are known. She never married or had children. She was last reported living in Rome in 1911. Her sculpture Hiawatha, pictured above, was made in 1868 in Rome, Italy which is one of many other works including Forever Free, marble made in 1867 and Death of Cleopatra.

Photo by Quentin Moses © 2002