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.
