Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions

Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions is an intimate, single gallery exhibition featuring three marble sculptures carved by the acclaimed 19th century American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907). Born in New York, Lewis, who was of Ojibwe and African descent, left the U.S. for Europe in 1866 to build a career in art, eventually opening her own studio in Rome, Italy. Soon after, the international press began heralding Lewis’s talent as a sculptor. President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, Frederick Douglass, and many well-known authors, abolitionists, actors, and art critics visited her studio and testified to her artistic acumen. She returned to the Bay Area in 1873 to present her intricately carved neoclassical white marble sculptures—the award-winning Asleep (1871), its companion Awake (1872), and her Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871). These works will be on display in a museum for the first time in three decades. Lewis’s trip to the Bay Area contributed to the burgeoning art market and left a lasting mark on the region. During her stay in the West, more than sixteen-hundred people of all ages and races paid to see these extremely rare and finely wrought sculptures and the artist who made them. According to a review in the Pacific Appeal, Lewis’s sculptures produced “indelible impressions.”

This exhibition is organized by the Cantor Arts Center and curated by Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with Patrick R. Crowley, Associate Curator of European Art.

We gratefully acknowledge sustained support for Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions from The Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery Exhibitions Fund at the Cantor Arts Center.