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Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject
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About Child Of The Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis And The
Product Description 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. From Booklist Precious little reliable biographical information exists beyond the facts that Mary Edmonia Lewis was born free circa 1845, that she was of Native American and African American heritage, and that while she was a student at Oberlin College, she was accused of fatally poisoning two white female students. Found innocent after surviving a severe beating, Lewis moved to Boston, where she secured the support of prominent abolitionists, launched her remarkable career, and soon “escaped the racial politics of America” by setting up shop in Rome. Buick painstakingly analyzes Lewis’ standing as both “celebrity” and, given the racism of the time, “specimen.” By scrutinizing Lewis’ neoclassical marble sculptures and her interpretations of history (Cleopatra), the bible (Hagar), and American literature (Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha), Buick pushes beyond the assumption that Lewis’ art was merely an “expression of her identity.” Rich in testimony to Lewis’ impressive achievements as a “facile manipulator of marble and white patrons,” Buick’s rigorously argued and refreshingly forthright inquiry articulates the challenges inherent in the sculptures of an enigmatic, determined, and courageous American artist. --Donna Seaman Review “Buick provides the most comprehensive history of Lewis to date and a critical assessment of the discipline through close readings of primary sources and the leading scholarship on Lewis. . . . This volume is a crucial model for multiple disciplines. Essential. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers.” - K. N. Pinder, Choice “[D]oing justice to the subject of Edmonia Lewis may be beyond the knowledge of any single scholar, as studying her ‘differences’ and the ways in which she was cast as anomalous requires one to search a myriad of shifting databases and intervene in the interstices of archives. Speaking generally, however, this book goes a long way toward providing a model of responsive, responsible art history.” - Jennifer DeVere Brody, Women’s Review of Books “This book is so tantalizing because, as Buick herself concludes, Lewis remains an enigma. . . .
