Edmonia Lewis

Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, pays critical attention to the way in which we look at art through a gender lens. The question is not whether women are capable of producing great art but rather why have they been kept in the shadows. Nochlins essay is a founding document of feminist art history that explores powerful relationship between gender and art and the history of dynamic tension. Edmonia Lewis is not only an example of a prolific female artist, but is a sculpture of African American and Native American decent. In Lewis’s sculptures we see stylistically neoclassic imagery with an important twist, she puts her own identity at the periphery. Lewis work encompasses themes of religion, freedom and slavery and while she sometimes depicts African, African American and Native American people in her sculptures, she more often neutralized her subjects race or ethnicity which made her art more acceptable to the social norms during the 19th century. In order to achieve professional fulfillment, women during this time had to deny their femininity but for Edmonia Lewis this extended even further into denying her culture, race and identity. Had Lewis not been a woman, had she not have been born from a Chippewa Indian mother nor an African father, would she have been celebrated more for her artistic genius? American art historian Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists was published in 1988. This essay asks why artistic “greatness” and professional credit has been historically reserved solely for white Western males. While the titled seems facetious, it demonstrates Nochlins’ humor on a complicated issue grounded in social constructs, inequality and sexism. Nochlin notes that the question itself assumes that women are “incapable of greatness.” This assumption is what sparks Nochlin to explore the history of artistic institutions and education systems. From the Rennaisance up until the end of the nineteenth