Forever Stamps 2022 Edmonia Lewis – Black Heritage Series, Commemorative Issue, First-Class Postage

The work Lewis produced during her prolific career evokes the complexity of her social identity. Known by an Ojibwe name that translated into English as Wildfire, she made and sold crafts for tourists for part of her childhood when she lived with her aunts near Niagara Falls, NY. Many details of Lewis’s early life are unclear, and Lewis herself cultivated a deliberate air of mystery about her upbringing. Her brother, a successful entrepreneur, appears to have funded her education – a rare opportunity for a young American woman in the 1850s.

Lewis’s drawing of the muse Urania, her earliest known work, was made during her time at Oberlin College in Ohio. In Boston in the early 1860s, Lewis sculpted clay, plaster and marble busts and medallion portraits of famous men and women. She exhibited and sold plaster-cast replicas at public events.

In 1865, Lewis sailed for Europe and settled in Rome, where she created marble neoclassical sculptures that often incorporated African American and Native American subjects. A Roman Catholic, she also made numerous religious sculptures and took commissions for sculptures for churches in Baltimore and Scotland. At the time, her studio became a must-see attraction for American tourists. She continued to sculpt busts of prominent Americans who visited Rome in the 1870s and 1880s, and she frequently returned to the United States to exhibit and sell her work.

With heightened attention to Lewis’s life and career in recent decades, previously unlocated works have come to light, and she has become more widely represented in museums and private collections. As the public continues to discover the beautiful subtleties of Lewis’s work, scholars will further interpret her role in American art and the ways she explored, affirmed or de-emphasized her complex cultural identity to meet or expand the artistic expectations of her day.

Additional information about Edmonia Lewis is available on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website and on Google Arts & Culture.

The Edmonia Lewis Heritage stamp is being issued as a Forever stamp, which are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price.