Next Stop: The Stanford University Cantor Arts Center
Edmonia Lewis’ award winning neoclassical marble sculptures Asleep (1871), its companion Awake (1872), and her Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871) are on an exhibit tour! The sculptures that have been on display inside the California Room for many years are making their way to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University for an exhibition starting September 17th 2025 to January 4th 2026.
The Life of Edmonia Lewis
Mary Edmonia Lewis was born in 1844. Both of her parents passed away early in her life; her Haitian father in 1847 and her mother of Ojibwe and African American descent two years later. Following their deaths, she stayed with her aunts, also members of the Mississauga tribe near Niagara Falls until she was about age of eight. Her older half-brother, Samuel “Sunrise” W. Lewis, provided her financial support throughout her life, funding her early schooling near Albany and her attendance at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Her career at Oberlin ended abruptly when in her third year she was accused of poisoning two white female classmates with cantharides. Defended by John Mercer Langston, who went on to become the Dean of Howard Law School, Lewis was acquitted of the charge. During the order, Lewis suffered through a highly publicized trial, bearing the pain of a broken collar-bone as the result of a severe beating by white vigilantes. Her reputation tarnished, a Dean who levied a charge of stealing art supplies, prevented her from registering for classes in 1863, whereupon Lewis moved to the abolitionist stronghold Boston in 1864. She studied under sculptor Edward A. Brackett. Her brother again provided her with room and board and a small studio space on Tremont Street. She became well-known about the free people of color in New England and abolitionists throughout the North East.
Lewis sculpted a well-regarded posthumous bust of the white colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who led the Black regiment known as the Massachusetts 54th—all of whom were killed in South Carolina. With the considerable proceeds from plaster casts of the marble bust Col. Shaw, she elected to travel abroad in 1865 and eventually settled in Rome, where she worked among a group of American female sculptors such as Harriet Hosmer. Italy was a popular destination for neoclassical sculptors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, due to the availability of fine white marble and the many Italian stone carvers who were adept at transferring sculptors’ plaster models into finished marble products. Lewis rarely employed workmen, however, completing most of her arduous marblework without assistance.
In 1872, Lewis returned to the United States to exhibit five marble sculptures at the new galleries of the San Francisco Art Association. The major San Francisco and hundreds of others attended the exhibition on Pine St. In 1873, the city of San Jose invited her to display her three remaining unsold works at City Market Hall. They were later shown at the San Jose Catholic Fair and were admired by thousands of paying attendees of all race and ages. In December of 1873, a fundraiser was held to purchase Lincoln as a gift to the San Jose Public Library. Sarah Knox-Goodrich, the organizer of San Jose's first Women's Suffrage Association, bought Awake and Asleep. They were donated to the library some time prior to 1914.
Lewis left the United States in 1865, moving permanently to Rome and then relocating to Paris and finally to London in 1901. She died on September 17, 1907 of Bright’s disease (inflammation of the kidneys) at the Hammersmith Borough Infirmary in London.
Special Thanks to Jennifer DeVere Brody.
California Room Collections
Edmonia Lewis Digital Collection
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