page_title: Native American women in the arts
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Native American women in the arts / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Angel De Cora, painter
context_page_description: Women in Native American communities have been producing art intertwined with spirituality, life, and beauty for centuries. According to mixed-media artist Nadema Agard, "Native American women have always been an integral part of the creative vision, and [they] continue to contribute to Indian aesthetics independently, in collaboration with other women, and in tandem with Native American men." Women have worked to produce traditional art, passing these crafts down generation by generation, as well as contemporary art in the form of photography, printmaking, and performance art.
context_section_description: Edmonia Lewis, an African American-Ojibwe sculptor during the mid-1800s, began her studies at  Oberlin College, a college known as the first in the United States to admit African American students. It was there that Lewis changed her Ojibwe name Wildfire due to discrimination and pressure she felt from the community. She began to study under the guidance of popular sculptor Edward Augustus Brackett after moving to Boston in 1863, and there she created a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the African American 54th Regiment. This work drew great praise from the community, including that from fellow sculptor Harriet Hosmer and the Shaw family, who offered to buy the bust. With the payments she received from Shaw's likeness Lewis was able to fund her trip to Rome, Italy in 1865. There she expanded her arts in the neoclassical realm and became the first American woman to seek training in neoclassical sculpture.
  In Rome, Lewis shared a space, the studio of 18th-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, with fellow sculptor Anne Whitney. Lewis began to carve in marble to avoid accusations some would make of fellow artists that their work was done by studio stone cutters. She found inspiration in her dual ancestry, the abolitionist fight, and the civil war. Another great inspiration of hers was the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his poem, The Song of Hiawatha, and she sculpted a bust in his honor due to her admiration. As described by Anne Whitney, "Mr L. sat to her & they think it is now quite a creditable performance, better I think than many likenesses of him." Another well-known sculpture of hers, Forever Free, stands in white marble. Inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation, it depicts a man with his hand raised with a broken chain and shackle. Beside the man is a woman on her knees praying.
  In 1876, Lewis' work was shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Lewis's epic work, The Death of Cleopatra, was presented for the occasion. In this piece she portrayed the Egyptian queen in a vulnerable state, which was unprecedented for the time. Artist William J. Clark commented at the time:
  this Cleopatra ... resembled the real heroine of history ... Miss Lewis' Cleopatra, like the figures sculpted by Story and Gould, is seated in a chair; the poison of the asp has done its work, and the Queen is dead. The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent—and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been reproduced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments.
  In the late 1800s Angel De Cora (Ho-chunk) was a painter and writer who contributed to art as a Native American who had been assimilated through a policy put forth by President Grant. Her earliest paintings appeared with her own stories, The Sick Child and The Grey Wolf's Daughter, in Harper's Magazine.  In her writing De Cora sought to change attitudes about Native Americans and described situations everyone could relate to. De Cora had a talent with combining a mix of Native American painting style with the mainstream European American style popular at the time, otherwise described as transculturation, and reflected the emotions from her stories in her art. Her success with her stories in Harper's helped her start a career in illustrating books about Native Americans for children. Though she had other interests in art, she was encouraged by her professors to pursue Native American influenced art because of their idea that art and ethnicity were linked. Though De Cora flourished as an artist, she was still torn between two identities that were placed on her: one the noble savage, the other a product of successful assimilation, and though Harper's had published her work, it described her as a "naive ... Indian girl," and one of her mentors only had this to say about her: "Unfortunately she was a woman and still more unfor
caption: Angel De Cora, painter
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