Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012

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Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subjects , Duke University Press 2010

Reviewed by

Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon

Temple University

In this groundbreaking text, Pai Buick does a remarkable job framing the problematized history of “African Americaness” and “Native Americaness” in, both, “American” (to be read: “Anglo-American”) art criticism and popular culture. From the sparse and limited literature on or about Edmonia Lewis to the reoccurring ethnocentric “reading”  (cum interpretation) of her life and work, Kirsten Pai Buick’s thoughtfully researched text problematizes traditional art history scholarship that would position Edmonia Lewis between either/or binary extremes of “exotic/subversive, [or] black or Indian” (xvi)

Edmonia Lewis (c. 1830’s to 1911) was the first recognized Afro-Native Indian woman sculpture. An admittedly, interesting case of both “mistaken identity” and “constructed identity”, Pai Buick suggests that “identities” like “race” and “gender” are socially constructed “processes” that can be shaped, framed or dismantled. In this well-researched text, the author implores her readers to be mindful of Edmonia Lewis’ “agency” and how she used it in the construction of her public processes of race and gender, contextualized against the backdrop of a post-Civil War, Reconstruction, Victorian, intellectual discourse. Edmonia Lewis’ work was atypical in it’s time, in the sense that she helped define the genre of “American” classical art.

Where other art historians and scholars viewed Edmonia Lewis’ flawless classical sculpture hoping for indices and commentary on her “African Americaness”, “Native Americaness” and/or “femaleness”—only to be disappointed, the few instances when Edmonia Lewis’ work is given serious consideration in the historical record of other public discourses, most of the writers who even bothered to include this pioneering Afro-Native American artist would slip into a pattern of either “arbitrarily” assigning sub textual interpretations of race, class and gender to her work; or castigating it for so-called “pathologies of lack”. (xvi)

Kirsten Pai Buick urges her readers to always keep in mind that Lewis was “a participant in culture and helped to actively construct the major ideologies of her time.” (xvi) By first looking at the art history literature on other early African

American artist such as landscape painter, Robert S. Duncanson (1821-72), Pai Buick builds an absorbing analysis on the multiple ways with which Eurocentric traditions, American education institutions and white subjectivity “police”  reifications of “race and gender, accountability and authenticity in the public record.

This “Negro Problem”/Women’s Question framework  that the memory of Edmonia Lewis and her work conjures up, contributes to the construction of “schema” (Oscar Gandy, 1998) and the “expectation of Blackness”, “Native Indianess” and “womanhood”. As Toni Morrison writes, “American education favors, both a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression; formations and exercises of power; and mediations on ethics and accountability.” (Pai Buick, 2010: xviii)

With a vested interest in controlling representations and interpretations of “African” images, “Native Americaness” and images of gender, Pai  Buick’s research points to significant examples of art historians who, consciously (or unconsciously) demand the replication of the artist’s race and gender in the art forms that become  “mainstreamed”.  In that model of “image policing”, Pai Buick’s research suggests, artists are rewarded for “reification of race and gender”, accountability and authenticity. On the other hand, for those artist of color or women who do fail to neatly fit into the “expectations”, the artist’s world can also become quite punitive.

Pai Buick’s work in Child of the Fire, builds on the assumption that, like most social constructs, white subjectivity performs itself. Leaving the historicizing and interpretation of “the other” to individuals with their own set of biases built on reinforcing power, is one of the ways of controlling representation, accountability and “authenticity”. One strategy that formalizes that replication of “expectation” occurs through “readings” of the artists’ race and gender through the search for “auto-ethno-biographic” critique and interpretation in the public discourse. In these instances of “white out” strategies of “policing otherness, white subjectivity quickly becomes, not just cultural ethnocentrism; but rather, a purposeful political exercise of power.

During (and immediately following) Edmonia Lewis’ entre into the world of European sculpture, 19^th Century Enlightenment scholars firmly purported that “appearance and blood…was thought to carry racial characteristics that were made manifest on the body”. (Pai Buick: 136) Needless to say, during that time, “Blood” and “purity” became, if not an obsession, then at least a fixation in the US. (Pai Buick: 136) Critiques, then, naturally thought that in the artistic works of artist of color, their style, subject matter and subtext needed to be tied, both to their heritage and consequences of their “blood”.  In other words, the expectation (that Lewis seemingly, purposely ignored) was that her work should have been “naturalistic” (i.e. “natural” to her). (Pai Buick: 136)

This “expectation”, that the artist should have “mirrored” her “Indian-ness” or “African-Americaness” “reduces intention to the most limited sense of reifying and re-representing [of] fixed racialized and gendered identity.” (Pai Buick: 136) Edmonia Lewis, seemingly, never played along to the “expectation”.

The big question, then, that Kirsten Pai Buick asks and attempts to answer through out her text is whether “the black artist must [always] replicate the black self in the art”? And, if they don’t, can artists of color mask their “presence” as “absence”?” (Paid Buick: 148)

Pai Buick spends a great deal of time in Child of the Fire directly addressing this “Negro Problem” framework as the normalization of racialized readings of both African American and Victorian women’s art.  The author builds an impressive case for re-thinking, first, Edmonia Lewis’ purposeful construction of an “ambiguous” identity; and then, the breadth of the artists’ strategically fluid “classical” Western art.  

As Pai Buick reveals, Edmonia Lewis purposely would not allow herself to be neatly “couched” in either/or dichotomies of polar extremes. Oscillating between her constructed identity as “ex patriot” and as a “national” or “American” artist among European artists of the day; in her lifetime, Lewis defied both her patrons and critics alike to simply dismiss her work by neatly “pigeon-holing” her art into categories. As the author writes, “Lewis manipulated the dichotomy of otherness.” (xxi)

In Pai Buick’s chapter on “The Failure of Description”, the author “unpacks” the political economy of arts production that was so confining in the nineteenth century for artist by race or gender. “Lewis’ image was (re) shaped largely by the white women who wrote her into existence.” (Pai Buick: 13) She was someone that did not “conform well to gender ideals that Victorian culture supported.” (Pai Buick: 81) By today’s standards, we might say Lewis dressed herself and her public image in trans-gendered attire (probably in response to a vicious beating she endured while a student at Oberlin in 1862.) (Pai Buick: 9, 141)

Her clothes, her apparent reluctance to marry, to become a mother—even her choice to choose “sculpture” over some other art form were all strategic responses to the Cult of Womanhood (usually reserved for white women); the cult of motherhood (that  since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publication of Uncle Tom’s cabin (1852) had already begun popularizing notions of Black women forever as “nurturers” and “other mothers”. (Patricia Hill Collins, 2000) The expectation for Black women at this time was as “mothers” mothering other people’s children and raising white babies, sometimes, even a head of their own. Even the exploration of Lewis’ subject matter, (particularly in her “ideal works”, women are depicted as the contrast to men and these women purposely do not look “African” nor “Indian”.

In order to understand why her objects appear the way that they do, one must begin by contextualizing Lewis’ work with the technical and ideological parameters of neo classical sculpture and the culture of sentiment in mid-nineteenth century Europe and the United States.” (Pai Buick: 49) Telling stories, as the author writes, in “the very poetry of stone,” Lewis’ work offered images of manhood and freedom tied to notions of power. (Pai Buick: 60) Lewis contrasted “piety’ against “masculinity”. For the most part, Lewis’ art did not present the usual domestic narratives;  but nevertheless (by reviewing the extant copies of some of her work) Lewis’ work did presents men as the “bearers of meaning.”

When we begin to investigate and critique Lewis’ art in relation to the circumstance in which she lived, we can only then begin to understand the extraordinary nature of Edmonia Lewis’ life and contributions to American art.  From her “Native American” and “African American” themes (such as Hiawatha and Forever Free); to her attempts at modernity (relying on “scientific data of the day” to inform physical features and iconographic motifs (as in Cleopatra’s death); or heroics (with busts like that of Robert Gould Shaw, c. 1864),  Lewis capitalized on Victorian “sentiment” and developed a shrewd business acumen that kept her art in the public discourse—both as “high art” and among the common masses as commercial reproductions and uniquely sanctioned “authentic” Indian souvenirs.

Rejecting notions of a purely sentimental femininity, in her personal life, Edmonia Lewis’ work always offered interesting public discussions on the “definitions” of Freedom. Because so many of Edmonia Lewis’ critics wanted to find in her work, evidence of self-portraiture; when they couldn’t find flaw in her work for want of finding what they wanted, these critics and historians accused her of repressing or suppressing her history and “autobiography”.  Historicizing the acceptance of the autobiographic theory, enables those in power to rationalize ethnocentrisms and gyno-centric translation.

“Americaness” is a process.” (Pai Buick: 116)  So the question that we must still grapple with is what is the “duty” of artists of color? Will the “expectation” of the ethnic “other” always inform White “knowing” versus Black “known”? And when we revisit critiques of Black artist in the historical record, should we always pre-suppose that work as a voice editorializing the “expectations” of otherness, contextualized against the social constructions of race and gender in its day?

Kirsten Pai Buick writes  that “both exoticizing and subversive narratives operate under a specific kind of sexual racialism”. (Pai Buick: 177) Whether “romanticized “ or “pathologized”, one thing is clear. At a time, when few black women had agency or “voice”, Mary Edmonia Lewis defied the expectations, manipulated her own public persona and created master works of “art”.    

Bibliography

Collins, Patricia Hill. “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother Daughter Relationships” in Gender Through the Prism of Difference. Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner, eds. Allyn Bacon. Boston. 2000. Pp. 268-278.

Gandy, Oscar. Communications and Race: A Structural Perspective. Arnold. London. 1998.