“Edmonia Lewis and Black Women’s Activism in Civil War Boston”

(attendees chattering) - Good afternoon, good afternoon. Thank you all so much for coming. My name is Sean. I'm the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and it's my great privilege to welcome you to the talk, Edmonia Lewis and Black Women's Activism in Civil War Boston, presented by Caitlin Beach. Caitlin Beach is assistant professor of art history, affiliated faculty in African and African American studies and interim director of the Asian-Americ

an studies program at Fordham University in New York City. She holds a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Bowdoin College year of 2010. Her book, "Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery" published by the University of California Press in 2022, was the recipient of the 35th Charles C. Eldredge, a prize for distinguished scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian Museum and the Phillips Book Prize from the Phillips Collection and University of Maryland. Her work on this book was supported by the Met

ropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, the Smithsonian, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Royal Academy of Arts. She's also a contributor to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Exhibition publication, Fictions of Emancipation, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux recast published in 2022 and her work has appeared in British art studies, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art and the edited

volume, Republics and Empires, American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1842-1970. This afternoon's talk is hosted by the BCMA in conjunction with the exhibition, The Book of Two Hemispheres, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in United States and Europe, which opened two weeks before, just the week before last and will be on view through July 21st of this year. The exhibition highlights how fine art and visual culture serve to propel the fame, both of the book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and its author, Harriet B

eecher Stowe on both sides of the Atlantic. In this sense, the exhibition shares many points of connection with Professor Beach's scholarly work, which examines the medium of sculpture's, major role in the production and circulation of imagery centered on slavery and its abolition, both in the United States as well as Europe. Sculptor, Edmonia Lewis and Author, Harriet Beecher Stowe were of course contemporaries and both achieved incredible renowned during their lifetimes. Professor Beach's talk

today will expound on and place Lewis at the center of this visual culture of abolition in which "Uncle Tom's Cabin" also played a role, but in different ways. Everyone here, I just wanted to also make sure to invite you to a reception in the BCMA Entry Pavilion following this talk and I encourage you if you haven't already, to go see the exhibition in the Markel Gallery, but first let me welcome Caitlin Beach. (attendees clapping) - Hey, okay, so oh, microphone, okay, great. So thank you so mu

ch Sean for the introduction and thank you for the invitation to come speak here. So thanks to everyone at the museum who helped organize this today and thank you, all of you for coming. It's really great to see so many familiar faces in the audience. It's also very weird to stand here and not sit there, So I'll do my best. So is the volume okay? Okay, great. Okay, so, so, right, so sculpted objects whether in the form of small handheld medallions or busts in marble or plaster helped shore up co

nnections within abolitionist networks of the 18th and 19th centuries. In one offsided instance in 1788, the English Potter and Manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood sent a package containing several of his famed anti-slavery medallions to the Pennsylvania Society for the abolition of slavery, writing to Benjamin Franklin, the society's then president that he hoped quote, "The subject of freedom will itself be more canvassed and better understood" and even as late as 1893, three decades after slavery's

juridical abolition in the United States, the Sculptor, Ann Whitney commemorated the Author and Abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe with a plaster portrait bust and as many of you know, both of these objects along with many others are on display next door in the very exciting exhibition, The Book of Two Hemispheres. The place of sculpture within anti-slavery networks is central to my presentation today, which focus on a set of works in plaster by Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor working between the Uni

ted States and Italy during the second half of the 19th century. Between 1863 and 1865, Lewis modeled a series of plaster portrait medallions, statuette and busts from her Boston studio. Among the first work she created as an artist, they featured the likenesses of prominent people including Abraham Lincoln, the abolitionist, John Brown and Wendell Phillips, and two celebrated officers of the Civil War regiment, the 54th Massachusetts infantry, William Carney and Robert Gould Shaw, the latter of

whom you see here. These early works are little known, but they played a crucial role in Lewis's career. Scholars have discussed how the sculptor first sold them to a circle of abolitionist patrons in New England and as a result was able to move to Italy and propel her career to international heights. Indeed, it was from her studio in Rome where she carved marble versions of the Shaw bust in the Phillips medallion in 1867 and '71 respectively. Both of these works hint at the form of their plast

er prototypes, while at the same time raising questions about their initial production in the 1860s and so my talk today revolves around the story of how Lewis's sculptures first circulated and the kinds of cultural work they performed in so doing. Lewis's sculptures enjoyed a wide purview in the 1860s. Period sources attest to their promotion in the abolitionist press, circulation at anti-slavery meetings and exhibitions at soldiers fairs. Few are known to survive today, which challenges our fu

ller understanding of their original significance. So I'd like to take this absence as a starting point to consider their efficacy as works of art mobilized in the project of wartime relief efforts. in Civil war era, Boston and at relief fairs in particular, Lewis's artistic practice unfolded amidst the sphere of Black women's activism, centered towards the aid of African American soldiers, their families, refugees of war and the formerly enslaved. All argue that the praxis of making and the poe

tics of plaster specifically were central to this project. Executed in a medium evocative of both the provisional and the curative, Lewis's work proposed one way of shaping the terms of relief work in the material world. So while the plasters, while the sculptures plaster materiality likely factors into their absence today, it was paradoxically central to their meaning, circa 1864. To lay foundations for understanding Lewis's work, I'll speak first of her early life in upstate New York where she

was born and raised and in Ohio, where she studied. Her experiences in education in both of these places helped shape the kinds of projects she would later undertake as an artist, as well as the publics, in which it would circulate. Lewis shown here was born in the town of Green Bush, New York near Albany in 1844. Of Afro Haitian and Native American descent, she was raised in the care of her mother's sisters on Anishinaabe homelands by Niagara Falls and during these years she made and sold with

her aunts baskets in embroidered moccasins for the fast-growing souvenir trade, between indigenous makers and Anglo consumers in the Great Lakes region and this was a formative moment. In interviews given later on in her career, Lewis mentioned her time with her aunts and also made allusions to such handcrafted objects in a variety of her works, including the old arrow maker, a sculpture based on the popular poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" which featured the protagonist Minnehaha seated alongside

her father, wearing embroidered deer hide moccasins and carefully twining a mat in her lap and as the scholars and basket weavers, Kelly Church and Cherish Parish have recently pointed out, the old arrow maker, though on the one hand based on a fictionalized poem, also resonates strongly with the Anishinaabe artistic practices in the ways that it presents a female figure as a maker in keeper of cultural traditions between generations. As we'll soon see, Lewis' early experiences with this woman-l

ed sphere of art and entrepreneurship, not only found form in the subjects of her sculpture, but also bore distinct parallels to the woman run relief projects that she would later participate in, in Civil war era, Boston. In the definitions of womanhood that Lewis encountered in her studies however, differed from those she experienced before in her youth that I've just talked about. In the 1850s and early 1860s at the behest of a wealthy, older brother, she left Niagara Falls to attend a New Yor

k Central College and then Oberlin in Ohio, where she enrolled in what was called the College's Young Ladies Preparatory department. Both of these institutions were distinctive to 19th century American education. They were founded by social reformers and abolitionists in the name of progressive ideals and supported the enrollment of students regardless of race or gender, welcoming what was for the era significant numbers of free Black students such as Lewis as well as students who had formerly b

een enslaved. Yet, it's important to note that the ideologies of reform, the espouse unfolded differently in reality. In her important study of Lewis's work, the Art Historian, Kirsten Pai Buick discusses the ways a college like Oberlin did not safeguard against an environment in which students of color and women of color especially were subject to racism and Lewis herself was the victim of several incidents of racial violence that ultimately culminated in her departure from the college before g

raduation. In spite of its liberal mission as Buick notes, Oberlin's pedagogical vision in the 19th century was ultimately beholden to a patriarchal white supremacy with the core aim of educating female students so that they might better navigate the domestic sphere as mothers, teachers and caregivers, but amidst these institutional limitations, the college and surrounding town of Oberlin still remained an important nexus of anti-slavery activism, which would be crucial to Lewis's time there as

well as in the years to follow. There she met William Lloyd Garrison who edited the influential anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, whose prominence in Boston would later facilitate important links to the abolitionist press in the art world. It was also at the college where Lewis made a series of connections with fellow students, who had later become central to her professional and social circles, including the Attorney and Educator, Richard Greener, who you see at center, who is an early col

lector of works by Lewis, and in short in Ohio, Lewis forged ties with communities of intellectuals and anti-slavery activists, who's support help shape her work in significant ways. As Frederick Douglass later recounted of a chance encounter during a visit to Oberlin in 1863, "We remember conversing most earnestly and encouragingly with Lewis than a student with regard to art. She had exhibited some signs of talent in drawing and painting, had evinced such enthusiasm for the art, that we were t

hen led to advise her to seek the east," meaning Boston "And by study prepare herself for work and further study abroad." Douglas's mention of Lewis's artistic talent is expressed in a graphite drawing she completed while still at Oberlin, in which she shows the Greek muse of astronomy, Urania swathed in drapery and holding in her hands the classical attributes of pointing rod and celestial orb. Urania here appears strikingly sculptural with undefined pupils and a body defined by a smooth polish

ed surface and a sense of three-dimensional heft. Some forms are enclosed with deliberate and steady lines while others swell and fall through passages of subtle shading as seen in the drapery that cascades in the foreground and while it's likely that Lewis produced the sketch after studies of an antique Roman statue reproduced as either a plaster cast, or in a printed engraving, this is neither a simple copy nor static form. She notably depicts Uranin three quarters view, an angle that makes it

appear as though the muse herself is perhaps sculpting the orb, as the broad limbs its curved surface, and as such it prefigures what we'll later see as a defining aspect of Lewis' practice, in which she pushes beyond a neoclassical paradigm to imbue her figures with a sense of liveliness and decisive action. I now want to shift our attention to the beginnings of Lewis' career as an artist in Boston, focusing in particular on the ways her work intersected the networks of abolitionism that we've

just begun to discuss. Lewis left Oberlin for Boston mid 1863 and quickly immersed herself in the city's artistic circles upon her arrival. It was as she would note in 1864, the quote, "Best place for me to learn to be a sculptor" end quote, after gaining foundations in the medium under the tutelage of the artist Edward Augustus Brackett, Lewis established her practice in room number 89 of the newly established studio building that you see here, which was a lively nexus of sculptors, painters a

nd photographers that was regarded in its day as a quote, "Perfect hive of artists." In addition to artists, the studio building was also home to the New England's Freedman's aid society, which had been recently established to support former bondspeople and Lewis would go on to forge a close association with this society as well over the course of the 1860s. They promoted her work regularly and after the end of the civil War, she traveled to Virginia under their auspices to work as a teacher of

formerly enslaved children in the south and it was in this context in late 1863 that Lewis conceived of her first recorded sculpture, a plaster medallion of John Brown, the white abolitionist who raided a federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry West Virginia with the intent of launching an armed slave rebellion. As noted by newspapers at the time, she modeled the medallion after a plaster bust of brown completed by her former teacher, Brackett in 1860. Though no known copies of this work survive, Brac

kett's bust as well as a bust of brown that Lewis executed over a decade later offer possible indications to its appearance. The former had completed his sculpture following a meeting with the abolitionist as he awaited trial for his Harper's ferry raid and in the bust, as you can see, Brackett duly emphasized brown's deep set eyes, sharply furrowed brow and forked beard making for a portrait that many recalled, that for many recalled the forbidding presence of Michelangelo's Moses. In Lewis's l

ater sculpture of Brown that you see on the right, likewise, teems with intensity. suffused two with a sense of contemporaneity, owing to the fact that she depicted Brown in period dress, rather than in the bare chested neoclassical manner as did Brackett. He gaze his rightward with a piercing expression, accentuated by hollowed cheeks and wildly flowing hair. Given its similarities to Brackett's bust, it's likely she drew upon the memory of her early medallion in modeling the plaster of 1876. L

ewis's choice to depict Brown speaks to her engagement with anti-slavery politics by way of her sculptural practice. Her strategic promotion of the work further attests to this, weekly newspaper notices from the period revealed that she distributed medallions for display and sale at the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston as well as the publishing offices of Robert Hamilton's weekly Anglo African newspaper in New York. In these contexts, Lewis's John Brown Medallion was promoted as a small s

cale, affordable object for display in the home. We might imagine it occupying what Jasmine Nicole Cobb has elsewhere termed The Transatlantic parlor or a sentimental physical and domestic space that gave form to new visions of Black freedom In the late 19th century. Small sculpted medallions had of course long been mobilized in concert with abolitionist discourse. We can recall Josiah Wedgwood's anti-slavery cameo of the 1780s, reproduced widely in the British Atlantic in order to mobilize supp

ort for campaigns to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, but what did it mean to pursue these efforts in 1863? At a moment when the promise of emancipation in the United States, depended increasingly upon the contingencies of the American Civil War? The Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect on the first of the year in 1863, but had limited purchase as a military provision that did not free all those enslaved. It nevertheless spurred action. As the liberator observed, "A day after the

proclamations issue, the abolitionists will therefore increase not relax their efforts," end quote and if many Black abolitionists had previously withheld full support for a conflict waged by a federal government, that, I'm sorry. For a conflict waged by the federal government, the projects to eradicate slavery and support the union became increasingly intertwined as the aims of the war moved more clearly towards emancipation. In one area that united both of these interests was the effort to en

list and support African American regiments. We can understand Lewis' work over the course of 1864, as part and parcel of this enterprise, where in support for Black soldiers fighting in the war translated into support for abolition and vice versa. After completing her medallion of John Brown, Lewis modeled two small plasters depicting officers of the 54th Massachusetts infantry. One of the war's first African American regiments. The first statue she completed was a tabletop statuette, depicting

one of the units celebrated Black officers, Sergeant William H. Carney and the second was a bust of the regiment's white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw had been killed as the regiment led a union assault on a confederate fort in July of 1863 and Carney, wounded, rushed forward to carry on the charge and like the brown medallion, both of these works circulated amid abolitionist networks and they also appeared at soldiers fairs, where they were marketed alongside other goods and handc

rafts, neither is known to survive today, likely because of this very context of consumption, but the circulation of both reveals a great deal about the social and political work of sculpture in wartime, Boston. Lewis' bust of Shaw appeared across a variety of spaces and media. It was displayed at the fairs mentioned above with the late officer's family pleased with what they considered a quote, "Excellent likeness of their son." The Shaw family then collaborated with Lewis to reproduce the bust

in multiple formats, including the creation of 100 plaster casts taken from the original, as well as carte-de-visite of the work made by the local photographer, Augustus Marshall. Finally, several years later, one of Shaw's sisters commissioned Lewis to produce the marble version that you see here, which she produced in Rome in 1867, adding an inscription that had not been present in the earlier plasters, "Martyr for freedom" carved in the block letters on the bus rounded base, so you see that

just here. Shaw's martyrdom so prominently declared on the marble version of the bust was embedded in a complex web of narratives constructed around the bodies of both artists and subject depicted. If many white male sculptors of the 19th century depicted Black female subjects in their works, Lewis' Shaw represented a radical inversion to this norm. Period commentaries acknowledged this in patronizing terms, with newspapers including the Boston Evening Transcript and The Liberator, running stori

es that speculating that Lewis had undertaken the bust quote, "Out of a grateful feeling of what he had done for her race," end quote. and at once erasing her indigeneity and sublimating her Blackness into an essentializing condition of indebtedness. Accounts such as these, speak to the ways Lewis's work was historically understood as a reductive expression of identity, rather than the artist's own nuance negotiation of the expectations and demands of her diverse audiences. We would do better to

think of Lewis' Shaw bust in strategic terms, a response to a world in which white Bostonians preferred to lionize the colonel who looked like them rather than the soldiers who did not. If organization of the 54th Massachusetts infantry, itself replicated dominant racial hierarchies of the day, with high ranking white commanders in charge of non-commissioned Black officers and infantrymen so too did many of the ways in which the regiment was remembered. For his famous 1897 memorial to the unit

on Boston Common, Augusta Saint Goudens cast a monumental bronze panel that foreground Shawn horseback in relief so high it was nearly in the round, while Black infantry men march on and foot behind him, in freeze like formation with their forward motion arrested by rigid marble columns on either side. In three decades later it was the Shaw family who chose to replicate only the bust of their son, which the sculptor was reportedly permitted to quote, "Sell for her own benefit at $15 a piece" and

not Lewis's earlier statuette of his Black comrade, William Carney. From what I've just discussed, it appears at first glance that Lewis's Shaw bust was afforded more visibility than her statuette of Carney. Though she conceived of and modeled the Carney sculpture prior to that of Shaw's, it was the latter that gained outsized attention in wartime Boston for the ways it aligned with this accepted narratives about Lewis's and Shaw's racial subjectivities. It was through her display and reproduct

ion of the Shaw bust as we have seen that white Bostonians commemorated the legacy of one of the war's first African American regiments by way of the body of its white kernel, but the exhibition of the Carney statuette opened onto a different set of practices directly connected to the welfare of the unit's Black soldiers and their families. In order to better understand this cultural work, its first necessary to return to both of the sculptures themselves. Period accounts and images offer contex

t to the original plasters that Lewis modeled of Carney and Shaw, despite the fact that both have been lost to time. The statue of Carney reportedly showed the officer in the melee of battle, perhaps as he had been depicted in a popular Currier and Ive's lithograph wielding the regiment's flag and leading fellow soldiers on at the apex of the prints composition. The only clue to its appearance comes from a correspondent for the newspaper, the Weekly Anglo-African who described the figure poised

in quote, "A kneeling attitude, holding up the colors lest they touched the ground." The plaster Shaw also remains unlocated, but Lewis' later marble as well as period photographs, the original plaster taken from different angles offer insight to what it looked like in the round. Shaw tilts his head with this expressiveness accentuated by gentle contours around his eyes and slightly parted lips. If the squarely furrowed brow, set mouth and fatality of the later bust lend a monumentality to the m

arble Shaw, the nuances of the earlier plaster show a figure who appears alert and concerned and even from our limited description of the Carney statuette, it's possible to see how Lewis imparted to both of her sculptures an impression of action and liveliness, however pronounced, we can think of in the description that says in a kneeling attitude holding up the colors or we can think of the subtle details of the Shaw sculpture with a tilted chin and an opened mouth and we'll recall Lewis's inte

rest in presenting a lively figure with her drawing of Urania and additionally it was not uncommon for sculptors of this period to infuse small works like busts and tabletop statues with an approachable narrative. John Rogers did so with his popular genre groups and Lewis too would go on to emphasize tableau like settings with statues such as the old arrow maker, where the figures of Minnehaha and her father rise from their handiwork to meet the gaze of Minnehaha's love Hiawatha, significantly s

mall scale tabletop works such as these were often made with an eye to sentimental markets in reform-minded context like fundraising fairs, where they might punctuate social affiliations and common causes. The Carney statue in the Shaw bust function in this way as Lewis displayed both at Boston Soldiers Fairs held in the fall of 1864. The statue made its debut at an event called the Colored Ladies Sanitary Fair in October and the bust at one called the National Sailors Fair a month later with ea

ch sold to benefit wartime relief efforts. These fairs and the Colored ladies sanitary fair in particular are important, because they ask us to remap the coordinates of Lewis' work within a network of Black women's entrepreneurship and activism rather than the circles of white Boston abolitionists, with whom she's been more frequently associated. Scholars often situate Lewis's artistic labor in relation to white women, whether patrons like Lydia Maria child or fellow sculptors like Harriet Hosme

r, Anne Whitney, but attention to her involvement in a world of affairs opens onto another circle of actors that comprise primarily women of color, engaging with the literary scholar, Koritha Mitchell has termed homemade citizenship or what the historian Martha S. Jones calls war work, or relief projects such as mutual aid and institution building. As Jones has argued in her study of 19th century Black women's activism, war work presented one venue through which some women could state claims to

new forms of public belonging and public culture in 1860s America. "To work for the war," she writes "was to claim freedom and citizenship." Moreover, as Lewis's participation in affairs will bear out, the spheres of war work in of creative production where by no means mutually exclusive. In the space of the soldier's relief fair, the active making took on associations at once therapeutic and political, working as a means the rich bodies and collectives could be made, remade and imagined anew. T

he Colored Ladies sanitary fair of October, 1864 where Lewis exhibited her statue of Carney stemmed from the efforts of the Massachusetts Colored Lady Sanitary Commission, an organization run by the Boston hairdresser and entrepreneur, Christiana Carteaux Bannister whose spouse the painter, Edward Mitchell Banister had a studio neighboring Lewis'. There's much to say here, but what's crucial is that much of the sanitary commission's work unfolded in response to the government's failure to fully

compensate or equip Black regiments. The fair was held to redress this with the commission declaring it, quote, "The most practical method of accomplishing their object of furnishing aid to soldiers, their families and children orphaned by war." Broadsides like the ones you see here, detailing these objectives were printed and the press highlighted efforts to work for the benefit of quote, "Colored soldiers in the place of a government that had treated them so cruelly" end quote. The relief fair

was not merely a patriotic gesture, but one of the few viable strategies of sustenance in the absence of institutional supports proffered by the nation state. In the central attraction of the Colored Lady Sanitary Fair was this extensive display of goods. Coverage of the event which came primarily from Black newspapers around the country gives insight into what the weekly Anglo African proclaimed, the greatest fair ever held in Massachusetts. Boston's Mercantile Hall, a building with strong ass

ociations to reform movements as a place for abolition and suffrage meetings was festoon with greenery banners and flags and tables stood laden with wares. Many of these wares were handcrafted with Lewis's sculptures appearing alongside furniture, textiles, samples of lace and myriad other quote, "Fancy articles." No known images of the Boston Fair survive, but illustrations of other fairs held in the northeast in the same year can offer us a sense of their atmosphere and the kinds of goods on o

ffer. In the engraving after Winslow Homer, we see women selling bouquets of handmade paper flowers to crowds of fairgoers and soldiers and handicrafts were not uncommon objects that really fairs, indeed they were the mainstays of such events and while the fairs themselves in many ways replicated capitalist structures as fund raising projects, their centering of the handmade and the handcrafted as opposed to the mass produced or industrially manufactured made space for what Stephen Knott sees as

a quote, "Spatial temporal zone in which capitalist structures can be stretched quietly, subverted and exaggerated" end quote. To this point, it's worth emphasizing how the ethos of handiwork conveyed not only women's domestic gentility, but moreover their industriousness. Consider Sojourner Truth's famous carte-de-visite from the same moment in which the activist appears before the camera as a dextrous maker with yarn and knitting needles in hand. The art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, has

written to the centrality of craft to Truth's carefully self fashion images, noting that knitting was a form of labor, exertion undertaken as a patriotic duty, not a gentile hobby. In other words, handmade objects could say a great deal about the seriousness of women's war work. The plaster works Lewis exhibited at soldiers fairs commanded unique associations with the handmade, perhaps more so than an oil painting or a marble sculpture. With their small scale and associations to the domestic sph

ere, tabletop sculptures invite a sense of close and intimate engagement and the variegated surfaces of plaster works in particular frequently bear the tactile traces of the sculptor's hand, marks from a modeling tool, the tiny grooves and speckles to accumulate as the materials exposed to air or rough passages smooth out by quickly working fingers. Moreover, the association between plaster, hands and handicraft was not uncommon in 19th century sculpture. Harriet Hosmer produced a plaster life c

ast of the clasped hands of her friends, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a meditation on making and touch and Hiram Powers routinely cast the hands of his young daughter Louisa as studies for larger scale works. Although plaster is often dismissed as a mere preliminary study to more permanent works in marble and bronze, in the Victorian era, plaster evoked the haptic potency of the sculptor's touch. Plaster could also heal in the most literal of senses, and this was not an association l

ost on viewers attending a fair for the relief of soldiers. Physicians in 19th century hospitals often mix the powdery gypsum based compound with water to set bandages in immortalized limbs and indeed earlier in the 1850s, a Crimean war surgeon introduced the use of plaster splints in the field hospitals after having seen a sculptor at work in his studio. Civil War doctors also made liberal use in material to treat fractures and sprains as you see here in the surgeon's field guide and looking ba

ck on her time as a wartime nurse, Louisa May Alcott recalled, seeing a man's wound quote, "Held together with straps of transparent plaster, which I never see without a shiver in swift recollections of the scenes with which it is associated in my mind." Here, reading Alcott's words, we're reminded of what the literary scholar Elaine Scarry has written of wounds. She argues that they're unstable reference that can open onto infinite constellations of symbolism. What Alcott's passage presents the

n is an identification of a plaster bound wound with healing on one hand and the recollections of war on the other. Circa 1864, the tactile materiality of plaster hovered at the boundaries of the making and unmaking of the world and presented a possibility to reconcile one with the other. Put another way, as Johann Gottfried Herder wrote in his famous treatise on sculpture, touch alone reveals bodies. The relationship between plaster and the making of bodies, both sculptural and real coalesced w

ith Lewis's statue of William Carney. Recall again the weekly Anglo African's description of the figure as he quote, "Appeared in a kneeling attitude holding up the colors lest they touch the ground." This description is brief and enigmatic, but what it does tell us, it is clear that Carney's body is whole and scholars have rightfully singled out the statuette as Lewis's first recorded full length figure. As such, it presented a distinct departure from another contemporary small sculpture, John

Quincy Adams Wards, "Friedman," which depicted an anonymous Black man with broken manacles at his wrists. Ward statute also debuted during the war at the National Academy of Design in 1863 and was later cast into bronze. The figure embodies a state of liminality as he twists his body upward and outward from a seated earthbound pose. By contrast, Lewis's Carney statuette hinged on the representation of a decisive action and specific actor. If words were presented a nameless figure as an embodimen

t of a generic type of, "The Freedman," much like other representations of Black figures and Western sculpture, Lewis' statue presented one of the earliest ruptures to this tradition in the depiction of a Black man as a named individual connected to a specific historical event. In Lewis's depiction to depict Carney in the action of battle for deeper resonance beyond mere fidelity to historical narrative. Carney had been gravely wounded while struggling to saved the regiment's all important flags

, a symbolic act for which he was later lauded back home. It was significantly the Colored Ladies Relief Society that furnished and presented the regiment with these flags upon their incorporation in 1863 and a fundraising campaign that was spearheaded by a woman named Adeline Howard, who wasn't incidentally a good friend of Lewis's, the two would later go on to travel to Virginia to teach Freedman at the war's end and although Lewis had yet to arrive in Boston at the moment of the making and pr

esentation of these flags, her display of the Carney plaster at the colored Lady sanitary fair one year later perhaps reminded viewers that Black women's circles of making and relief had long been central to the regiment. An additional contemporary image underscores this idea. In 1864, Carney posed for a photograph with the battle worn flag he had famously wielded in the war, holding it with one hand while steadying himself with a cane in the other, the voluminous standard bisects his body with

the vertical stripes of tattered fabric falling downward to obscure and visually stand in for his injured right leg. The carte-de-visite matte surface and mid-range tonality further reify this illusion as the folds of Carney's trousers blend visually into those of the flag. It's difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. In parsing this detail, it's useful to draw again from Elaine Scarry who writes that "Pain becomes comprehensible in new ways when conceptualized as an entity outsid

e of the body" and she suggests that in such an action of re-imagining pain can be curative, hurt when projection projected onto an object to paraphrase, Scarry again. By its very separability from the body, becomes an image that can be lifted away, carrying some of the attributes of the pain with it. Here as limb melds into flag and vice versa, the photograph, much like Lewis's plaster statuette alludes to the place of material culture in the remaking of bodies in the wake of war. The circulati

on of Lewis's work during the civil war gestures to the possibilities of sculpture to work with, but also against dominant social, commercial, and political realities of the day. Fairs in many ways stood as manifestations of 19th century commodity culture par excellence. Marx reportedly wrote capital's famous passages on commodity fetishism after seeing dazzling displays of goods at the Crystal Palace in 1851, but relief fairs occupied what might be best understood as an alternative economy to t

hese spaces. Further structures to raise funds reflected and refracted mainstream practices of entrepreneurship in order to reimagine present realities. The Colored Lady Sanitary Fair was ultimately a redressive project. One that performed an essential politics of care to unfold in response to inequities of federal pay and support for Black soldiers and their families. This vision was radical in scope as it explored the possibilities in mutual aid outside in a place of existing frameworks that u

nfolded apart from the nation state. Objects like Lewis's statuette of Carney embodied these ideals in a concrete way, asking viewers to consider how single acts of making might promise generative and reparative possibilities for individual bodies and broader collective alike. I want to conclude by turning to one final work by Lewis. In 1867, she completed one of her best known works, the marble group, "Forever Free," which depicted a young man and woman rising out of broken shackles. The three

foot high marble group showed the two people, perhaps husband and wife, but also perhaps father and daughter, brother and sister on the quote, "Metaphorical mourning of liberty" as the artist had initially titled her work. The young woman rises on one knee with hands clasped, while her male counterpart stands upright holding one arm over her shoulder while lifting the other towards the sky with a broken manacle hanging from his wrist. They rise together, their gestures rhyming one another and th

e message here is clear. They've emerged from the chains of slavery, which snaken fragments at the statues base. In the eyes of one contemporary viewer, the statue quote, "Presented a telling in the very poetry of stone, the story of the last 10 years" end quote. In 1869, Lewis traveled from her home in Rome back to Boston to present "Forever Free" to her friend, Reverend Leonard Grimes of the 12th Baptist Church. This dedication spoke to Lewis' place in a longstanding network of Black activism

in Boston, one of which she'd been apart from the outset of her career. Grimes and his spouse, Octavia, who you see here, had been actively involved in wartime circles of reform, with Octavia Grimes working as one of the organizers of the Colored Ladies Sanitary commission in its 1864 fair. Scholars have precisely understood "Forever Free" as a work of reclamation as Lewis reasserts the couple as a family unit in the wake of slavery's dissolution of kinship bonds. Lewis's relief work adds an add

itional dimension to this sculpture. One that has to do with the ways women's wartime labor participated in a project, a familial and communal uplift in the age of abolition. Emancipation came after the war with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude in December of 1865. What this emancipation would entail and what it might mean for people who had been enslaved at that time was unknown. The defacto and de jure structures that then would in the late 19

th century come to forge the afterlife of slavery to call upon Saidiya Hartman use of the term "Were still in flux" and whether the realm of the visual could or should make space for narratives about the end of slavery also remained uncertain. "Forever Free" does not present its viewers with a decisive answer, but rather suggests with the upward motion, momentum of both figures, possibilities still unfolding, yet the spaces of relief work from which it emerged presented one prospect wherein prac

tices of citizenship and collectivity might take shape in the poetics of the material world. Thank you. (attendees clapping) - We would love to take questions for about 15 or so minutes. I wanted to make a note that for the purposes of recording we will have microphones being passed out, so if you wouldn't mind waiting for one of my colleagues to pass the microphone to you, but we'd love to have questions if there are. If people are gathering their thoughts, I can go ahead and ask you a question

, Caitlin. So I know that you addressed this in other parts of your work and I know that scholars have addressed this, but I was wondering if you could expand on the mediums of both marble and plaster and the whiteness of those media and how, if at all they've mapped onto racial discourses of the time? - Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a really good question and it's good that we have the "Forever Free" up here, because I think that there's been a lot of really interesting work that also shaped my

own work on the ways that the materials of sculpture in the 19th century related to ideas about race and particularly whiteness and so in the Neoclassical era when there were a lot of white marble sculptures, there were art writers, theorists like Winckelmann who thought that, you know, whiteness was equivalent to ideal beauty and so sculpture became a really racialized medium, because of the ways that white marble came to connote ideas of kind of racial hierarchies that were really kind of soli

difying in the 18th and 19th centuries and so when bronze becomes sort of the medium to surpass marble in the middle of the 19th century in sculpture, it also gets called upon to do the work of sort of racial description, where bronze might then connote Blackness in statuary for example and Lewis' work is interesting because she's sculpting in marble, plaster first and then marble and I think a lot of her work in plaster is really interesting because it sort of gets at kind of the, limitations t

hat women's sculptors and Black women's sculptors in particular faced in procuring sort of very expensive materials. So marble's really hard to procure, it's very, very pricey and so, you know, even into the 20th century works by artists like Augusta Savage, Meta Warrick Fuller, they're in plaster a lot of the times, like white marble was something that, you know, oftentimes white male sculptors who had a lot of wealthy patrons were able to afford and Lewis, once she comes to Rome and she sort o

f establishes kind of her foothold as an artist, she sculpts in marble and one of the things that's worth noting about her works is you'll notice on this statue, like kind of, it's a fairly soft looking surface. Like there aren't a lot of kind of really distinct details as you might see in other marble statues and her works are also quite small in scale. Like this is not life size, it's about three feet high and Lewis had fewer assistants to help carve her work than, you know, a sculptor like Hi

ram Powers of the day who had, you know, whole team of Italian men helping him carve his work, so like a guy to do the hair and a guy to do the, you know, the skin and everything, but Lewis was oftentimes carving her works on her own. So I think kind of like the fact that the materials of sculpture have often been racialized extends to kind of the economy of making sculpture itself and she's carving, you know, she's producing sculpture in a fairly conservative, neoclassical style, right, where t

hese figures are, you know, done in white marble and a lot of times scholars have kind of talked about the ways that the smaller figure sort of, she does not necessarily appear Black in the way that the the man does and it's really interesting to think about the ways that Lewis might have perhaps been creating sculpture that would deflect kind of the most vitriolic of racial criticism if she was to produce a sculpture of kind of a very, very realistic body of a person, that then people might cri

ticize her work more on the press by, you know, connecting it to racial stereotypes perhaps and so a lot of other scholars have talked about the way she sort of used marble strategically, like this really conservative medium associated with whiteness, sort of to her own strategic ends in ways that were also very much accepted by, kind of the, a quite conservative art establishment you know, in Italy as well as in the US. - [Sean] Other question? Yes, Frank. - Thank you so much for your talk and

for being here today. I'm interested in asking you about the 19th century carte-de-visite photographic representations of Lewis's sculptures, as scholars have explored, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth thought deeply about photography and the way in which it portrayed themselves publicly. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about what Lewis thought of these photographic likenesses of her sculptures? - Yeah, no thank you for the question. It's really interesting because Lewis was, from her

writings, was very interested in photography and because she worked in Italy and all her friends are in the US she would use carte-de-visite to send sort of images of her work, so there's kind of one notice where, or one instance where she had sent a kind of draft copy basically of "Forever Free" to a friend in Boston and they saw her work. So she uses it to just, you know, communicate what she's doing, kind of as a tool for her own practice and then I think she also uses photography in a way, k

ind of to sell her work. You know, people can only buy a sculpture if they have a lot of money or there's maybe only a hundred copies of this sculpture, but she would sell photographs of her works as well and so there are kind of instances later on in her career where she isn't selling her sculptures but she's selling her photographs of her sculptures, so it becomes a way to kind of almost further democratize sculpture and that if you can afford a bust by Lewis, you could maybe afford a carte-de

-visite and so she would kind of, whenever she would come back to the United States, she would oftentimes advertise the sale of both her sculptures and then pictures of her sculptures, which I think is really interesting as sort of kind of a way of promoting her work. - Thanks, this is fascinating. I'm fascinated by your sources. They suggest a lot of detective work. How did you find the materials? Where are they from? How did you piece them together? Because you have a really wide range of fasc

inating sources. - Yeah, no, thank you. That's a, it's an interesting point because I think that like oftentimes the way that Lewis' art in her life and her work gets written about is with people acknowledging the many archival absences that are around her life and I think that there's a great deal more to be learned about Lewis and one of the places where I found there to be quite a bit of material was in Black newspapers and so places like the Weekly Anglo-African or other Black newspapers wer

e really interested in Lewis' work and I think she also kind of fostered links to them as well, like she would place the advertisements in the papers and she'd go down to different publishing offices and sort of put her work there and so it was really interesting to see how she sort of sought out different ways to kind of work with the Black press at the time and so that was one place where there were a lot of really interesting references to works also that don't exist anymore and that's really

hard to write about in artist history and so you, you get images like these that are in various historical societies. I think these two carte-de-visites at the American Antiquarian Society, this one's at the Massachusetts Historical Society, but I think, you know, there's a lot of works by Lewis that are still probably also in private collections given the ways that, you know, they kind of circulated amongst sort of more intimate networks of friends and such. So I think there are many kind of s

tones that are unturned still for future scholars. - [Sean] There was a question in the middle here. (attendee speaks indistinctly) (attendees laughing) - Thank you. Thank you for your talk. My question is about any patronage that Lewis had. You mentioned it in relation to Hiram Powers and I can't believe that she supported herself entirely. Can you tell us anything about how she was able to be supported through her career? - Yeah, absolutely. So one big thing that gets her to Italy is that she

sells these busts, like the bust of Shaw and then the photographs of the bust of Shaw and so she's able to get money from that. One of her early patrons is a man named Richard Greener who was a Black student enrolled at Harvard in the 1860s and he actually had, there was like a notice in the Liberator where he had this medallion or a plaster version of this medallion of Wendell Phillips like in his dorm room and there was an announcement saying like it was in his dormitory and so she had sort of

patrons who were her contemporaries and like her friends and just sort of, you know, colleagues or friends that she had and then what was the other thing I was going to mention? Oh, she also had a brother who was, he had gone out west in the gold rush and he ended up becoming a barber in Montana and he sent her a lot of money so he sort of supported her as well. So it's kind of this, you know, when you're an artist you cobble together money from different sources and so it's family, some of it'

s selling works, some of it sort of like being crafty on your own and like selling photographs of your works and such. So a mix is the answer, yeah. - [Sean] Anne. - Thank you so much Caitlin for a fascinating talk and one of the things that I think for me enlivens your talk still further is its relationship to some of the discourse in the accompanying exhibition, The Book of Two Hemispheres and of course a really exciting connection between the presentation of Edmonia Lewis's career and the rec

eption of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is that these are things that we see unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic and so I wondered if you might be able to comment a little bit on the way in which subject matter perhaps specific to United States, specific to abolition landed among audiences in Rome versus in the United States that agree to which Edmonia Lewis was cognizant of rhythms that were playing out on both sides of the Atlantic and, or distinctions and then also related to that, I am curious whe

ther she ever did anything directly in response to "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Obviously she was involved in addressing themes that Stowe was also en engaged in, but just curious about those two questions. - Yeah, no thank you for that question and now my brain is sort of trying to go through like the list of works that she does, because I feel like someone recently asked me like had she done a work, like a sculpture of Harriet Beecher Stowe? I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe she did, may

be she didn't but I don't know yet, I don't know if she did work related to like scenes or characters from "Uncle Thomas Cabin" and like obviously you have like stuff from Longfellow that we see and we were talking about how artists in, well viewing the exhibition, how artists, you know, Italian artists start to take up like either the subject of slavery or the subject of Native Americans like as kind of American subjects in art and I guess one of the things that's interesting to me about Lewis'

work is when she's in Italy she produces "Forever Free," but she ultimately, it's destined for the US and it's destined for Black patrons in the US and it seems that quite a bit of her work is geared towards kind of, like sort of grand tour sculpture markets where like you, she might sculpt like a little cherub for you or like, you know, portrait like quite a few portrait busts or kind of kind of more small scale sentimental works and I'm curious the extent to which that, that's more market bas

ed about, you know, someone wants a cherub, they get a cherub and then she also became a very, very devout Catholic while she was in Italy, so she has like many sort of sculptures on very religious themes that she takes up and people have kind of talked about the ways that some of those themes sort of, kind of have particular residents in relation to Black history and sort of theories of African Americans in the United States and so yeah, I mean I would say that she has more works that deal with

sort of kind of romanticized depictions of Native Americans that are coming out from Italy rather than kind of a topic such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and I wonder if it is related to sort of, perhaps the anxiety around sculpting Black figures in her work given, kind of the questions of how they might be received, so when she sculpts a big Cleopatra that's at the Smithsonian that goes to the Philadelphia Centennial exhibition, she purposely does not sculpt Cleopatra as African looking partially as

a way to deflect potential criticism of the work that you know is either too close to her subjectivity or that Cleopatra should not be depicted as Black, so on and so forth and so I think she sort of, is kind of like moving around that topic in really interesting ways. - [Sean] Patrick. - Yeah, thank you professor. I learned an awful lot from this and I feel like I should have known more about Edmonia Lewis coming into this. My question was gonna be something about Haiti, but the conversation ke

eps sort of turning back to the question of representation and you've referenced a few times this concern about the representation of Black bodies, like how do you do that in the 19th century? How do you do that when the medium you're working in is a high art medium? when your patrons, the places you go to learn how to do this, are all associated with a certain kind of affluence and privilege? Does that sort of mean that you, I guess I'm just thinking about that concern she had about how you put

African Americans out there and art in a way that does not invite the kinds of stereotyping that are just absolutely suffuse American culture, right? So in written work, this is like the problem of respectability, right? And so I'm curious how you reflect on that and do you find anything that is kind of undercutting that or do you see her work as sort of almost wholly given over to that concern? - Yeah, no it's a really interesting question, because I keep thinking of like back to the exhibitio

n that, you know is just across the way the, the print of Cinque that's in the show in the ways that, that particular print when it circulated of, you know, a man who led a slave rebellion on the Amistad, right? And he's pictured in this print as you know, very sort of powerful and monumental and how that print circulated there were, it sort of tapped into particularly white anxieties about slave rebellions and whether it was the memory of the Haitian revolution or whether it was more recent sla

ve rebellions in the United States and so it does seem that this is something that Lewis was aware of and navigated and be being a Black woman sculptor, like she was the only one, so there really wasn't, you know, there were many women sculptors comparatively speaking, but very few other people like Lewis and so I don't know the degree to which she is sort of creating works that are kind of just sort of deflecting and kind of like strategically making works that will not invite such kind of crit

icism and I think the other thing to think about with "Forever Free" is also that Lewis is mixed race and she creates many, many works about indigeneity and I'm really interested, there has been like a lot of sort of discussion about the figure here and the way she looks sort of racially ambiguous and interested in the way that she might be, she could be, she doesn't, people always say, "Oh she looks white," but like she might not be white. Like she could be native, she could be, you know, any n

umber of sort of ethnicities in the ways that ethnicity is and is not read on the body, I think is really interesting in relationship to Lewis' work, 'cause it does seem that she wants to kind of divest the body as a place of racial signification in some points. - Well I think that our conversation in this room has to conclude now, but we are happy to continue the conversation next door over drinks and snacks in the Museum Entry Pavilion. So please let me, let us thank Caitlin again for coming i

n for this. (attendees clapping)