The studio of Edmonia Lewis (1845-ca. 1909), a member of the colony of women sculptors in Rome gathering around Charlotte Cushman (1816-76) in the mid-nineteenth century, was located in a former building at this site, now Suffolk Law, from 1863-65. As a child, Lewis, who had both African American and Chippewa ancestry, lived with her Chippewa mother’s people. Although she was born free, her favorite subject for her sculpture was freedom from slavery, demonstrated in Forever Free, a sculpture depicting a man and woman breaking their chains, made as a tribute to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. It is now on display at the Howard University Gallery of Art. Lewis sculpted historically strong women in her works Hagar and The Death of Cleopatra, as well as busts of Robert Gould Shaw, John Brown, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. Lewis’s identification with her Chippewa heritage led her to revere and create a bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of the poem, Hiawatha. The sculpture is now owned by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
