One Fine Show: “Edmonia Lewis, Said in Stone” at the Peabody Essex Museum

One should never underestimate the power of political merchandise. Our current president surfed into office on a raft of red baseball caps that were beloved and reviled by both sides, neither of which could deny their power. In Cleveland during the 2016 convention, I saw a man weep openly because a protester had stolen his. In 2024, the Democrats started selling merch depicting their candidate as nefarious, meant to imply he wasn’t, even as his supporters wore t-shirts showing him with glowing red eyes. They went on to lose 31 states.

The sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) found her audience with political memorabilia and rose to international fame in her own lifetime, but had not been the subject of a major exhibition until “Said in Stone,” a retrospective that recently opened at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Lewis went to Boston in 1863 at the encouragement of Frederick Douglass and began carving small, wearable portrait medallions of abolitionist heroes like John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw. These were a big enough hit that, within two years, she was in Rome, working with a group of expatriate female sculptors to carve ambitious marble works that fused neoclassical form with contemporary issues like emancipation, Indigenous sovereignty and religious freedom.

“Said in Stone” features 30 sculptures by Lewis, the largest-ever assemblage of her works. Among these is Hagar (1875), a four-foot-tall marble based on the Genesis character, who was cast into the wilderness with her son, Ishmael, after being enslaved by Sarah and Abraham. Given Lewis’s abolitionist tendencies, you would like to read defiance into her posture, but really, Hagar is about the flavor of empathy. Two hands cover an exposed breast, as the uptilted head strives for dignity in a bad situation. The former slaves in contemporary America used to self-identify as “Aunt Hagar’s children,” and Lewis’s sculpture would seem to capture their experience, no longer meek but unsure of exactly what comes next.

Portrait Bust of a Contadina (1872) works a similar vein, but portrays an Italian peasant with a hard face and costume jewelry. The piece is notable because it’s done in the neoclassical style but brings the subject from the religious and mythological to the workers she would have seen in Rome. The rich detail in the flower seems to tell the real story: petals unfold with an intricacy similar to the woman’s dress and perhaps her interior life. Atop her head, she carries some fabric, and maybe it’s just the laundry, but it does recall a crown.

The Clasped Hands of Gerrit and Ann Smith (1872) brings the focus even closer. Smith was a wealthy landowner in New York and one of the richest men in America, who used his money to support radical causes like John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. His wife Ann stayed with him even throughout a stint in an asylum, which may have been to avoid prosecution. In the sculpture, her finger reaches into his palm, supporting him on every level. Like the rest of the exhibition, it’s an exploration of what honorable politics look like in bad times.

“Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum through June 7, 2026.

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