Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject

by Kirsten Pai Buick

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, 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’s 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’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” 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. Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha ; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Biography Memoir

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2010

About the author

Kirsten Pai Buick, Ph.D., is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM). She was formerly a lecturer at the Art Institute of Chigaco (IL).

Reviews

[Kori · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous book. Less a biography and more a critical study. This books looks at the problems with art history conflating the artwork with the artist’s experience in the works of Edmonia Lewis. Buick also addresses this conflating in the works of a few of Lewis’ Black contemporaries, calling for a discipline-wide change in how the works of Black and Indigenous artists are contextualized: avoid racial essentialism and treat these artists as the creators who actively engaged and influenced the stylistic themes and trends of their day.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history that I had no knowledge of prior to reading this book

[ISRA · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75

I almost gave this a 3 but I can’t lie, this text was repetitive and tedious with segues into other artists, authors, & earlier analysis as examples I had no interest in. The segues also went on longer than the portions about Edmonia. I barely was motivated to finish it, it was so bogged down with intellectualism, theory, and ‘pseudo analysis’ of Edmonia. Plus references to other books, some of which I’ve read. What I did take away wasn’t about Edmonia at all. I felt the book went in circles and I struggled to stay engaged though I am familiar with the subject matter, studied/study art history both African and surface level indigenous art works, the notion of disappearing indigenous people, dying races myth, authenticity and preservationism in art history. Overall, I really wanted to learn more about Edmonia in a reinvigorated contemporary sense or format to understand her work, drive, & influences. But this is not that. Additionally the images of Edmonia’s work are ‘buried’ in the book not aligned to where it’s addressed/analyzed within the text which I wouldn’t mind if the author hadn’t discussed another author’s the arrangement of images as important for chronology.

This is an analysis of Edmonia juxtaposed by other contemporary female artists, later black female artists, black or blackish male artists and their treatment by white art historians - not a biography as it is subgenre-d. In some ways it addresses a bit of the idea of self fashioning but only in passing. All in all it just felt like too little Edmonia and a lot of supplemental text.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book. It wasn't the biography that I thought it was instead it was a scholarly work that looked at how Lewis's work and a few fellow artists has been perceived by critics, art historians, and various contemporaries.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting details about a fairly forgotten artist. But bogged down with art history details from a doctoral dissertation. For art history students only!

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, though repetitive in the way academic writing is required to be in support of theses.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kristen Pai Buick writes just above my head but what I could understand was very enlightening an well reasoned

[Jennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I talk about this biography here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiyKb...