In 2016 Shawnya L. Harris saw a small bust come up at auction and asked her director whether the Georgia Museum of Art could buy it. Ten years later she is co-curator of the first major retrospective Edmonia Lewis has ever had, opening in Athens on August 8 and running to January 3. Roughly thirty marbles, pulled from public and private collections in the United States and abroad, several of them never exhibited anywhere. Lewis was born in Greenbush, New York in 1844, started working in Boston in 1863, and sailed for Rome in 1866 to take a studio off the Piazza di Spagna, becoming the first sculptor of Black and Mississauga descent to win international recognition. She died in 1907 and the work scattered. Some of it was recovered decades later. Some is still missing. The catalog is from the University of Chicago Press; the show goes on to Raleigh next spring. The gap is that the room has spent a century treating Lewis as a biography, and this is the first time it can treat her as a body of work.
8.6SCORECROWNROOM'S RIGHTHEAT 68▮
ROOM'S RIGHT — the room is loud, and the room is correct.
BENCHMARK IN THE 50 · Lauren Halsey — the 50's sculptor; Lewis is the ancestor that lane never got to cite
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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