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Edmonia Lewis
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Edmonia Lewis was born on July 14, 1845 in the village of Greenbush in Rensselaer County, New York. Her father was African-American, and her mother was part Native American from the Mississauga Tribe of the Chippewa Nation. When her parents died early on in Edmonia's life, she was raised as a Mississauga Indian with the culture and values of the Chippewa Nation. By 1858, Edmonia left her Native American environment for a life at the preparatory department at Oberlin College in Ohio a Mecca for staunch abolitionists and Christian advocates. Edmonia Lewis was at Oberlin when, on October 1859, John Brown and two African-Americans from Oberlin were involved in the Harper’s Ferry arsenal raid. Her talents were already recognizable; therefore, after leaving Oberlin she moved to Boston and started her first lessons in modeling clay under the tutelage of sculptor, Edward Brackett. While studying art Lewis was also very active in raising money for the families of black Civil War soldiers. Additionally her first big successful project was the completion of a marble bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw the leader of the all black 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which she constructed from memory after his death. At the end of the Civil War, Lewis went to Italy to study and work with other sculptors and artists involved in the purist reproduction of the neoclassical art forms. In Rome, Lewis was able to meet many prominent American writers. Among them were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In spite of her poverty Lewis was determined to sculpt with marble, doing all of the intensive heavy labor herself. Edmonia Lewis' last known exhibition was in the United States Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1878. No record of her death was ever documented, and different sources report various dates from 1890 to after 1911. 
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