Edmonia Lewis 2022 Forever Postage Stamps Self-Adhesive Sheet for Commemorative Mail

The work Lewis produced during her prolific career evokes the complexity of her social identity. Known by an Ojibwe name that translated into English as Wildfire, she made and sold crafts for tourists for part of her childhood when she lived with her aunts near Niagara Falls, NY. Many details of Lewis’s early life are unclear, and Lewis herself cultivated a deliberate air of mystery about her upbringing. Her brother, a successful entrepreneur, appears to have funded her education – a rare opportunity for a young American woman in the 1850s.

Lewis’s drawing of the muse Urania, her earliest known work, was made during her time at Oberlin College in Ohio. In Boston in the early 1860s, Lewis sculpted clay, plaster and marble busts and medallion portraits of famous men and women. She exhibited and sold plaster-cast replicas at public events.