{"id":36188,"date":"2014-04-04T18:10:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T18:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36188"},"modified":"2017-02-01T18:32:47","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T18:32:47","slug":"child-of-the-fire-mary-edmonia-lewis-and-the-problem-of-art-historys-black-and-indian-subject","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36188","title":{"rendered":"Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History\u2019s Black and Indian Subject"},"content":{"rendered":"

Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History\u2019s Black and Indian Subject<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Duke University Press<\/a>
\n2010
\n344 pages
\n51 illustrations, incl. 18 in color
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4247-2
\nPaperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4266-3<\/p>\n

Kirsten Pai Buick<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of Art History
\nUniversity of New Mexico<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Child of the Fire<\/i> is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis<\/a>, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis\u2019s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis\u2019s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis\u2019s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct \u201cAmerican\u201d national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.<\/p>\n

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis\u2019s career\u2014including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy\u2014and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis\u2019s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha<\/a> in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s<\/a> epic poem The Song of Hiawatha<\/i><\/a>; Forever Free <\/i>and Hagar in the Wilderness<\/i> in light of art historians\u2019 assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra<\/i> in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n