Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.
Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject

Arts & Photography

Kirsten Pai Buick

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

This catalogue was published with Spelman College Museum of Fine Art with generous support from the Wish Foundation, Inc., and accompanies the exhibition of the same name, on view at Spelman from January 25 to May 19, 2018. It is edited by Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, PhD, director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and features contributions by Kirsten Pai Buick, PhD; Erin J. Gilbert; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, PhD; Antwaun Sargent; and Franklin Sirmans; a foreword by Mary Schmidt Campbell, PhD, and an interview between Deborah Roberts and Valerie Cassel Oliver. Additional support was provided by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. It includes full-page, full-color illustrations of the 80-plus works that were on view in the exhibition as well as installation photographs. It is the first major publication on Roberts' work and includes some of her early work as well as her more recent collages and text-based images.

Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi

Franklin Sirmans

Andrea Barnwell Brownlee

Valerie Cassel Oliver

Erin J. Gilbert

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Antwaun Sargent

Georgia Museum of Art and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

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