Kirsten Pai Buick is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Child of the Fire

Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian SubjectBy Kirsten Pai Buick

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4247-2

Contents

Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiPreface FRAMING THE PROBLEM American Africanisms, American Indianisms, and the Processes of Art History…………………xiiiAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………xiiiChapter One INVENTING THE ARTIST Locating the Black and Catholic Subject…………………………………………….1Chapter Two THE “PROBLEM” OF ART HISTORY’S BLACK SUBJECT……………………………………………………………31Chapter Three LONGFELLOW, LEWIS, AND THE CULTURAL WORK OF HIAWATHA…………………………………………………..77Chapter Four IDENTITY, TAUTOLOGY, AND THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA………………………………………………………..133Conclusion SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL Toward a More Responsive and Responsible Art History………………………………….209Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………….215Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………257Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………….277

Chapter One

Inventing the Artist

Locating the Black and Catholic subject

Against all odds, Mary Edmonia Lewis aspired to be a sculptor. Who can really say when her dreams began? That she had them at all is rather miraculous. Born a free person of color, she received an unusual amount of formal education but chose not to follow the natural direction of that education and become a teacher. Instead, she found a path virtually uncharted by African Americans, that of an artist. In her carte-de-visite (plate 1), one can observe the precarious nature of Lewis’s choice. The image represents an element of risk-risk because Lewis’s image is one that rests in tension between her status as celebrity and her status as specimen. Her status as celebrity was determined by her career as an artist living and working as part of an expatriate community of American sculptors in Italy. These artists were responsible for linking the United States to a long history of European creativity; simultaneously, as Americans they would be credited by home-grown theorists with improving upon the art of antiquity and the Renaissance because of the superior moral condition of the American Republic. Lewis’s status as specimen was determined by how race and gender shaded and nuanced her career. The dissonance between being an “artist” and being “black” or “Negro” made her an anomaly, but an anomaly easily accommodated in an age in which human beings were exhibited as curiosities.

In the pursuit of why she chose this course, most scholars focus on the personal details and minutiae of Lewis’s life. They mention the art training she received at Oberlin because it contradicts later constructions (corroborated by Lewis) of her as without knowledge of art. They focus on the scandals in which she was involved at Oberlin to highlight the personal damage they must have done to her, one source going so far as to suggest that her art career was a form of revenge. And in terms of Oberlin College itself, they celebrate its liberalism in admitting women and African Americans, juxtaposing the college’s commitment to abolitionism in the face of the surrounding towns’ racism. Or, when the subject of the scandal arises in the context of the college, the focus becomes Lewis’s affront to the conservative policies such as temperance and the strict codes of behavior for men and women adopted by Oberlin. Regarding her time in Boston, again the focus is on the personal: for example, her tutelage by Edward Brackett; the studio on Tremont Street that she took and all its famous inhabitants; the support she received from individual abolitionists; and the works of art she created that facilitated her travel to Rome.

Counter to the traditional readings of Lewis’s education, this chapter will focus on the institutionalized processes and the places that made Lewis’s career possible. I employ the concept of “career” in order to consciously move the discussion away from biography and all the ideological baggage and confusion that it carries. While the craft of biography attempts a verisimilitude of the lived experience, a kind of fictional transparency that can be laid over a life, the writing of the career adheres to different rules. The career stands as the medium between the artist as individual and the artist as a product of culture. To study the career is to study the effects of culture and institutions on the artist that then reveal to us patterns of intention-that is, the relation between the object and its circumstances. By focusing on the institutionalized processes that helped to shape Lewis, both as an individual and as an artist, my line of reasoning differs subtly but significantly from the discussions of others. Her education at Oberlin, for example, was an education in sentiment, while the scandals at Oberlin can be viewed as Lewis testing and being tested by Victorian culture.

Precedent and expediency allowed Lewis to forge a successful career as a sculptor, and her racial identity helped as much as hindered her in the pursuit. Lewis studied, trained, and practiced in three of the most important centers for education and art culture. Oberlin College trained her for teaching, and it also educated her in the role that women were expected to play in society. In Boston, she found yet another milieu that was both a haven for African Americans and one that would cultivate her objective to train as an artist. The abolitionists of Boston fought not only for the immediate emancipation of African Americans held as slaves; they also lobbied for the rights of full citizenship for enslaved and free blacks. A significant part of their arsenal was the individual example of African American accomplishment. In Lewis, they found it expedient to use the artist as an example of the artistic achievements of which the African American was capable, if given a chance. As a result, Lewis received national and international press coverage from those sympathetic to the cause of human rights. In Rome, she encountered the white American women who had gone before her to practice as artists. There, Lewis enjoyed more social, spiritual, and artistic freedom than she had in the United States: in Italy, she escaped the racial politics of America; as a Catholic, being in Italy brought her closer to her spiritual home; and finally, expatriation to Italy represented the mainstreaming of her artistic experiences. Furthermore, in Italy she could fully participate in the market for sculpture, which by the 1860s was an international affair. Conversely, had Lewis remained in the United States, she would have had to continue to rely on abolitionist patronage almost exclusively and the sale of her work would have been largely dependent upon her as a product of race. By going to Italy, however, she made herself part of the international art world, gained a measure of distance from her abolitionist patrons, and thus set the terms upon which she would practice her art-as part of a highly visible community of American artists-that depended on a national rather than a racial identification. Therefore, environments did exist, if only minimally, to nurture Lewis. Her most steadfast patron, however, was her brother Samuel, who lent emotional and financial support throughout his lifetime. Through the lens of Lewis’s career we begin to understand that patronage is a dialogue, a kind of cultural discourse of reciprocal manipulation though rarely involving an equal exchange between parties.

EARLY HISTORY AND OBERLIN COLLEGE

Contrary to Lewis’s claims, evidence suggests that her mother, Catherine, was not a “full-blooded Indian.” Catherine Lewis was born in Canada to an African American father named John Mike, an escaped slave, and to a mother of mixed African American and Ojibwa parentage. Catherine lived with her parents on the Credit River Reserve, now known as the city of Mississauga, on Lake Ontario. The Indians living on the reservation were entitled to annual government payments. However, because membership derived from the father and Mike was black, the council of elders voted to exclude him and the children from a share in the government grants. Although the council had no authority to enforce its ban, it did bring pressure on the family to leave. The Mike family went to Albany, New York. Records show that there Catherine Mike married a black man named Lewis. A date for the wedding was not provided nor was his first name given. Lewis was from the West Indies and worked as a gentleman’s servant. In 1832, Edmonia Lewis’s brother, Samuel, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family relocated to Newark, New Jersey. Early in 1844, they moved again-to the village of Greenbush, across the Hudson River from Albany, New York. Edmonia Lewis, according to her passport application, was born on or about the fourth day of July in the year 1844. According to Lewis, she and Samuel bore Indian names as well; Samuel was known as Sunshine, and Lewis as Wildfire.

By the time that Lewis was about nine years old both parents were dead. Catherine’s two sisters adopted the children, who remained with them near Niagara Falls for approximately four years. They made and sold baskets, moccasins, blouses, and souvenirs for tourists at the falls, in Buffalo, New York, and in Toronto. In 1852, Lewis’s brother placed her in the care of a Captain S. R. Mills and left for California. Though he conscientiously sent money back for her board and education, his life diverges from his sister’s at this point. In 1856 Lewis was enrolled at New York Central College in McGrawville, a Baptist abolitionist school. According to Lewis’s biographer, Marilyn Richardson, the college “was founded in 1848 as a daring and progressive academic enterprise. All of those connected with the school-faculty, students, trustees, and administrators-pledged their commitment to abolitionism, to ‘the doctrine of the unity, common origin, equality and brotherhood of the human race,’ and to the right of women to access to all levels of education.” Later, Lewis was in residence at New York Central College for the second half of the 1856-57 academic year, and for the summer and fall terms in 1858. During the summer term, she took classes in the Primary Department, which would have prepared her for regular courses in the academic and collegiate programs. According to Lewis in a later interview, she remained for three years but left when she was “declared to be wild.”

With Samuel’s aid and with the help of abolitionists, Lewis was sent to Oberlin College in 1859; she was probably fifteen years old. At Oberlin, she boarded with the Reverend John Keep and his wife from 1859 until she left the college in 1863. Reverend Keep, who was white, was a member of the board of trustees and was an ardent abolitionist and spokesman for the benefits of coeducation. Although integration was a matter of choice for white and black students, African American students were welcomed in both white and black households. Those who did not board with white families found accommodation among the town’s stable and prosperous black community. Ellen Lawson and Marlene Merrill have demonstrated in their research on antebellum black coeds at Oberlin that “by the mid-1850’s, a growing and substantial black community existed in the town, with many families headed by skilled craftsmen, such as carpenters, masons, and harness makers. The Oberlin census statistics for 1850 and 1860 indicate that these families provided homes not only for kin but for other black students attending the preparatory school and the college.” The college required that host families be pious and morally upstanding within the community. In 1862, for example, the Ladies’ Board decreed “no young lady shall board in any but a regularly organized family, where one at least of the heads of the family presides at table and family worship.”

The significance of education for African Americans during the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. In an interview in 1864 with the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Lewis responded to the question of education in this manner: “‘But, surely,’ said [Child], ‘you have had some education other than that you received among your mother’s people, for your language indicates it.’ ‘I have a brother,’ [Lewis] replied, ‘who went to California, and dug gold. When I had been three years with our mother’s people, he came to me and said, ‘Edmonia, I don’t want you to stay here always. I want you to have some education.’ He placed me at school in Oberlin.” Lewis, in a few phrases, managed to convey Samuel’s concern for her future, that he wanted something for her beyond the life she had with her Indian relatives. That “something” was only attainable through education. In the nineteenth century, there were few opportunities for women, and for African American women in the North there were three basic alternatives: domestic servant, operator of small businesses, or educator. Those who hired out in domestic-related service worked as cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, and caretakers, often in white households. The small businesses that African American women operated were enterprises such as hairdressing, catering, and owners of boardinghouses, or working as merchants in partnership with their husbands. Whether white or black, parity in wages did not exist for men and women. Women always earned less than men earned. Furthermore, teaching did not even ensure a viable living. It proved especially unrewarding for those African American women who established private schools. Frequently, they turned to religious organizations and antislavery societies for financial help.

Despite Oberlin College’s advanced attitude toward parity in education, those attitudes still fell under the aegis of nineteenth-century mores, which meant adjustments in the curriculum according to the perceived differences in the mental and emotional capacities of men and women. Oberlin had separate departments for the sexes, and although some women did receive bachelor’s degrees from the College Department, most studied in the Young Ladies’ Department, which conferred literary degrees. Also, when men and women did take classes together, as one professor assured the student body in 1849, “in those exercises which have for their direct object a preparation for public speaking and for public life, the ladies take no part.” Like the College Department, the Young Ladies’ Department was a four-year program. It differed from the College Department in that it did not require either in-depth study of ancient languages or higher mathematics. After 1850, the college substituted a number of courses to make up for not teaching women Hebrew, Greek, and advanced Latin language and literature. French, linear drawing, poetry, and modern literature were added to the curriculum in order to make Oberlin College comparable to the leading female seminaries.

Between 1835 and 1865, at least one hundred and forty black women attended Oberlin College, 80 percent of whom matriculated into the Young Ladies’ Course proper after first attending the preparatory courses within the Young Ladies’ Department. By 1865, three black women had received the bachelor of arts degree. The Young Ladies’ Department oversaw both the prep school for young ladies and the Young Ladies’ Course. The Preparatory Departments were designed to supplement gaps in students’ education so that they could take classes within the normal college departments. The prep school covered arithmetic, English grammar, elocution, spelling, linear drawing, modern geography, and beginning Latin and algebra. The curriculum for young women in the prep school was much lighter and more elementary, with no classes in history or Greek but with a strong emphasis on religious instruction. Lewis was enrolled in the Young Ladies’ Preparatory Department for the 1859-60 school year. Oberlin does have a partial list of Lewis’s classes: during the winter term of her first year, we know that she took three periods of algebra. After successfully completing her preparatory studies, she entered the Young Ladies’ Department, where she spent the next three years. During her second year, Lewis was excused from her conic sections class, which was a branch of geometry dealing with circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas. She did very well, however, in composition. The Young Ladies’ Department was designed “to give Young Ladies facilities for thorough mental discipline, and the special training which will qualify them for teaching and the other duties of their sphere.”

By probing the significance of Oberlin’s mission, we begin to view Lewis’s education in a radically different way; rather than focus on the “liberalism” of the school in admitting white women and students of color, we begin to uncover the institutional ideology that incurs on the student. In what Richard Brodhead suggested was the complicated interfiliation of sentimental values and educational policy at midcentury, Lewis was being trained for the duties of her “sphere”-as mother and teacher of the young. Education was viewed as advantageous for women, who controlled the domestic environment and child development. And within the family dynamic, teaching was the most active role that a woman should play. Lewis and the other black women who studied at Oberlin College were also part of a larger project, the subjects and objects of “domestic imperialism” in which the values and superiority of white middle-class culture were instilled by the school. In her study of nineteenth-century interracial boarding schools, Laura Wexler has demonstrated how “the ideology of domesticity infiltrated precisely those public institutions that are gatekeepers of social existence.” Sentimentalism, she continued, “supplied the rationale for raw intolerance to be packaged as education. Without the background of the several decades of domestic ‘sentiment’ that established the private home as the apotheosis of nurture, the nineteenth-century interracial boarding school could probably not have existed, since it took as its mission the inculcation of domesticity in former ‘savages’ and slaves.”

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Excerpted from Child of the Fireby Kirsten Pai Buick Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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