daughter of a Chippewa mother and African-American father; orphaned and raised by mother’s family
with sculptors Edward Brackett and Anne Whitney (1863, Boston)
1860 – enters Young Ladies Preparatory Department at Oberlin College
1863 –falsely accused of poisoning two classmates; she is acquitted, but not permitted to graduate; moves to Boston with support of William Lloyd Garrison
1864 – Lewis’s medallion of John Browne and bust of Colonel Robert Shaw are exhibited at the Soldiers’ Relief Fair in Boston; over 100 plaster copies of Colonel Robert Shaw sold
1865 – joins group of women sculptors working in Rome, Italy including Harriet Hosmer and Emma Stebbins; Lewis lives in Rome throughout the 1860s and 1870s (and rents Canova's former studio)
1872 - Asleep wins gold medal at National Exposition of Paintings and Sculpture in Naples, Italy
1873 – exhibits at the San Francisco Art Association
1876 – exhibits Death of Cleopatra and other sculptures at Philadelphia Centennial Exposition
1893 - exhibits Hiawatha and other sculptures at World's COllumbian Exposition (Chicago)
1896 - moves to Paris
1901 - moves to London
Rome (1865-1870s); US (many venues, 1869-74); New York (1898)
Hagar, 1875 (National Museum of American Art, Washington,DC)
Death of Cleopatra, 1876 (National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC)
Buick, Kirsten P. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010
Buick, Kirsten P. “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography,” American Art, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 4-19
Harrison, Bonnie Claudia. “Diaspordas: Black Women and the Fine Art of Activism,” Meridians, vol. 2, no. 2 (2002): 163-84