On Sept. 9, curator Shawnya Harris will lead visitors into the galleries of the Georgia Museum of Art and stop first in front of “Forever Free.” It’s a deliberate choice. As Harris put it, she wants starts there “to remind the visitor that [Lewis] was creating in the immediate aftermath of slavery.” Even though Edmonia Lewis herself was never enslaved, the emancipation of black people stayed “constantly on her mind and deeply anchored in her creative vision.”
That tour, capped at 30 people and starting at 2 p.m., is the next public entry point into “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” on view at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens through Jan. 3, 2027.
What is the Edmonia Lewis exhibit?
“Said in Stone” is billed as the first major retrospective of Lewis, a 19th-century sculptor of Afro-Caribbean and Anishinaabe descent. The show brings together roughly 30 of her sculptures from public and private collections here and abroad, alongside photographs, decorative objects, Indigenous belongings and contemporary work by artists Gisela Torres and Bonnie Devine. It’s co-organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum, where it opened earlier this year; it travels next to the North Carolina Museum of Art in April 2027.
Harris, the museum’s Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art, co-curated the show. Getting it to Athens wasn’t simple. “The sheer logistics of securing loans from disconnected public and private collections” was the biggest challenge, Harris said, describing “meticulous relationship-building and delicate negotiations, especially given the fragility of 19th-century marble.”
Who was Edmonia Lewis?
Lewis was born in Greenbush, New York, in 1844 and became the first sculptor of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous descent to achieve international acclaim. At 19, she met Frederick Douglass at Oberlin College, who encouraged her to “seek the East.” She set up a studio in Boston in 1863, before moving to Europe in late 1865 to join the leading American sculptors of her generation. It was in Rome that she carved her best-known work, “The Death of Cleopatra.”
“Said in Stone” includes sculptures never before exhibited. Asked which piece she’s most eager for Athens visitors to see, Harris pointed to a plaster bust of Robert Gould Shaw: “We found what we believe is the thumbprint of the artist on the underside,” she said, noting that few of Lewis’s surviving plaster busts let visitors see her skill at capturing a likeness so directly.
The exhibition also draws on new scholarship into how Lewis moved through Black community life in 19th-century Boston — through intermarriage, Black-owned businesses, the Black press and Black churches and schools — connections Harris said were “assumed” before this research but “never as clear.”
Lewis’s legacy
Asked what single idea she hopes “Said in Stone” visitors leave with, Harris didn’t point to a sculpture at all. “I was always impressed with how forward-thinking Lewis was as a businesswoman and how adventurous she was in relation to pursuing her career,” she said, noting Lewis made what appears to be 16 transatlantic voyages in a decade, “at a time when women, particularly women of color, were exposed to many limitations.”
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The Sept. 9 tour requires no advance registration beyond arriving early to secure a spot, and it’s one of several public programs tied to the exhibition running through January, including a Faculty Perspectives talk on Sept. 16 and an evening of poetry with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess on Oct. 1. An accompanying catalog is published by the University of Chicago Press.
