by Mattea Gernentz

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) defied all odds. A sculptor of African American and Ojibwe descent, she firmly eschewed the restrictions and conventions of her day. Fondly known as “Wildfire,” she dressed in free-flowing men’s clothing that allowed her to move unencumbered and never married. She was the first African-American sculptor to achieve national and, soon after, international prominence. Edmonia Lewis attended Oberlin College, one of the first U.S. institutions to admit women and citizens of diverse ethnicities; however, this progressive veneer appears to have had very little influence on the attitudes of the actual student body. Lewis later left due to blatant discrimination, including incidents where fellow students framed her for poisoning, accused her of theft, and, most horrifically, left her beaten in a field. Despite her departure from a formal art education, Lewis moved to Boston and pressed on with sculpting, where she began to be interviewed for important abolitionist journals. With the success of her early works, Lewis was able to afford a life-changing trip to Rome in 1866. In Rome, Lewis was taken far more seriously as a Black artist and was able to forge her own path, encountering increased freedoms and opportunities. She sculpted with marble as her medium, heavily inspired by neoclassicism. Rather than hiring male Italian sculptors to assist in translating her preliminary clay and wax models to marble, as was expected in her time, she worked alone, and, as her fame grew, her studio became a tourist destination.

I first stumbled across Lewis’ work through Tyehimba Jess’ odes to her sculptures in Olio, followed by Bridget Quinn’s Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order). I became so deeply fascinated by her life and art that I ended up writing one of my final undergraduate papers on Lewis’ art as an act of reversed ekphrasis, transforming narratives into visual art apostrophes that comment upon the racialized realities of her time. I remain amazed by how Edmonia Lewis masterfully captures the lives and nuanced experiences of strong Black women, such as Hagar from the Old Testament and the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra, through purposefully appropriating a traditionally white artistic mode. In doing so, she slips into an abundant space beyond categorization, reveling in complexity and chiseled skill, where she is free to reinvent, critique, question, and refine history and our perceptions of it.

Tawny Chatmon, a photography-based artist championing elevated portraiture, received her first camera at 19 years old. Born in Tokyo to a military family, Chatmon later moved with her family to the United States, where she developed a passionate love for theatre. Following her years as a performer, she then turned to photography as a new medium of expression. With the birth of her son, she became captivated with capturing the beauty of Black childhood, and, in 2010, she used photography to document the opposite side of the coin: her father’s battle with cancer. Of this time, Chatmon writes, “I began to think more about the meaning of my life and began to stop solely looking to my camera as a means of making a living and began seeing it as a way to communicate my joy, my pain and my frustration. I began to think more about the world I wanted my children to grow up in versus the world as it is today.”

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Chatmon’s portraits are almost always inspired by her children, relatives, and friends; after capturing photographs, she will typically digitally and manually manipulate these images through various artistic practices, such as digital illustration, photo-manipulation, paint, collage, and even adding tactile elements like gold leaf and illustrations. Chatmon has expressed that, with all of the messages she wishes to relay, she has been “unable to say everything I need to say with a singular medium.”

Chatmon’s dynamic art reflects on the past in addition to actively engaging the present and anticipating the future. Many of her works are presented in gilded, antique frames scavenged from estate sales, auctions, galleries, and the like as Chatmon is cognizant that the artwork previously displayed in these frames likely held entirely different subjects than her own. Old frames, new life and a new focus. Her beloved series “The Awakening” won the International Photography Award (IPA) in 2018 and was inspired by the paintings of the nineteenth century artist Marianne Stokes. In her recent series, “The Redemption,” Chatmon imaginatively reinterprets stylistic elements of Gustav Klimt’s Golden Era. This collection particularly responds to policies in many schools and workplaces that deem Black hairstyles as unprofessional or unkept. In her art, these locs and curls are emphasized with ornate swirling designs and bedecked in gold, signifying dignity and royalty.

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In all of her work, Chatmon powerfully centers the Black experience, firmly placing her vivid figures, that might elsewhere be regulated to the background or reduced to a status as “other,” into a radiant spotlight, beautiful and unafraid. She also uses her platform on social media (@tawnychatmon) to be an activist force for good, lending her voice to such hot topics as Black Lives Matter and #ENDSARS. Chatmon also recently created an “I Voted” badge to be featured in New York Magazine to encourage voters-by-mail who may not receive their traditional sticker this year.

For further research and appreciation of Black women artists, I recommend investigating the art of Laura Wheeler Waring, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett as examples of inspiring artists of the past, as well as the currently practicing artists Fabiola Jean-Louis, Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Monica J. Beasley, Simone Leigh, Amy Sherald, Howardina Pindell, Kara Walker, and Shenequa Brooks. There are so many more exemplary Black women artists that exist, and I cannot even begin to do them justice in this brief article. My only hope is that this will serve as a launching point to provoke conversation and curiosity, to inspire, and to ultimately celebrate brilliant Black women who have gifted the world with their talents and unique expressions of beauty.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.