For more than a century, parts of Edmonia Lewis’s story seemed to vanish. Sculptures disappeared into private collections. Others were misattributed or quietly tucked away in unexpected places. Some works are still missing today, known only through photographs or scattered references in letters and archives.

Yet Lewis herself was once one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 19th century.

Now, curators, scholars and communities are piecing the story back together — tracking down lost works, reconstructing her life and restoring her place in the history of American art. At the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass., the largest number of Lewis’s sculptures ever assembled in a single exhibition are on display in Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone.

The exhibition is part art history and part detective story — a search for sculptures and stories scattered across continents and generations.

A lost story

As the first Black and Indigenous woman sculptor to achieve international fame, Lewis lived a remarkable life that crossed geographic and cultural boundaries. Yet much of her story faded from public view. Like many artists of color working in the 19th century, Lewis disappeared from the dominant narrative of American art history.

“We are really working against a kind of forgetfulness in the discipline more broadly, trying to recover these important stories of artists like Lewis and their role in the larger American story,” says Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, PEM’s George Putnam Curator of American Art and co-curator of the exhibition.

Lewis broke barriers throughout her life. As a young woman she traveled between Canada and the United States, and later crossed the Atlantic at least a dozen times — no small feat in the 1860s and 1870s. Her artistic journey began as a child living with maternal family in upstate New York and Canada; then took her from the Midwest to Boston, when Frederick Douglass reportedly encouraged her to “Seek the East”; and ultimately to Rome, where she established a studio among an international community of artists.

“Her career was considered an impossibility even in her day and yet she overcame that impossibility,” Richmond-Moll says. “That’s what the exhibition celebrates.”

When Lewis died in 1907, she left behind no studio archive or personal papers. Her sculptures had been scattered across Europe and the United States, making it difficult for scholars to reconstruct her life and career.

“It has taken the real commitment of curators, community members and artists to revive her place within American art history by recovering sculptures that we thought had been long lost,” Richmond-Moll says.

Looking back in time

The PEM exhibition brings 30 of Lewis’s sculptures together with 85 additional objects — including sculptures, paintings, photography and archival materials — to situate Lewis’s work within the artistic world she inhabited. Sculptures inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry appear alongside religious and mythological subjects, reflecting the breadth of her artistic imagination.

Individually, Lewis’s sculptures grapple with themes of race, slavery and liberation, Native American artistry and agency, and spiritual transcendence. Collectively, they reveal her engagement with the defining questions of her era and her commitment to themes of reform, resilience, and community.

Lewis’s career was not without obstacles. As she pursued her work during and after the Civil War, some patrons advised her against addressing subjects such as race or emancipation, suggesting those topics were not appropriate for a Black woman artist. Yet the sculptures themselves — powerful, ambitious works carved in marble — stand as evidence of her determination to define her own artistic path.

The exhibition also features remarkable rediscoveries. One of the most exciting is a bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the white Union officer who died leading the all-Black Massachusetts 54th Regiment during the Civil War. Lewis exhibited the bust publicly in 1864, helping establish her reputation. For decades the sculpture was believed lost.

New research revealed that the bust had been in the collection of the Massachusetts National Guard in Concord for more than a century. Now it is on public view again.

Although Lewis’s contributions were often overlooked in mainstream art histories, her legacy endured in Black communities. For generations, Black women’s organizations and scholars at Historically Black Colleges and Universities championed her achievements and preserved her memory.

In 1967, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority donated Lewis’s sculpture Hagar — which Lewis conceived as a symbol of faith and liberation — to the Smithsonian Institution. That same year, Forever Free was acquired by Howard University’s Gallery of Art.

New archival discoveries continue to illuminate Lewis’s life. Letters found at the Boston Athenaeum reveal that when Lewis first arrived in Rome, she was welcomed not only by prominent expatriates from Boston but also by women from Salem who helped her establish her studio and even shared Christmas dinner with her.

Keeping the exhibit alive

Other works in the exhibition demonstrate Lewis’s remarkable skill as a sculptor. One example is Bust of a Contadina, a sculpture of an Italian woman dressed in traditional costume that highlights her ability to suggest texture and color through marble.

Another highlight is Cupid Caught, depicting Cupid ensnared in a bear trap. The sculpture had been damaged decades ago and was missing several pieces. Curators collaborated with a conservation team in Georgia to restore the work in time for its presentation at PEM, the first stop on a three-city national tour.

One of Lewis’s most famous works, The Death of Cleopatra, does not appear in the exhibition because the monumental marble sculpture is too fragile to travel. After being shown at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the sculpture disappeared for decades, surfacing in unlikely places — including a racetrack, a saloon and a shopping mall — before eventually entering the Smithsonian’s collection.

In the years following Lewis’s death, the prevailing narrative suggested that the artist herself had vanished into history. But artists, scholars and communities have continued the work of rediscovery.

“There have been many individuals who have been working to preserve her story,” Richmond-Moll says, “and keep the flame of Lewis’s art and life alive.”

Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone is on view at PEM through June 7, 2026. It then travels to the Georgia Museum of Art and to the North Carolina Museum of Art. For more information on the exhibition and related programming, go to pem.org. To hear an interview with the exhibition curators, tune into the PEMcast at pem.org or wherever you listen to podcasts.