African American Museum holds stamp-reveal event
On Wednesday, Feb. 16, at 11 a.m. in its auditorium, the Joysetta and Julius Pearse African American Museum of Nassau County celebrated Black History Month with a “stamp reveal”: unveiling the latest Black Heritage stamp from the United States Postal Service.
With songs and dances by local talent, the museum administrators commemorated the accomplishments of Edmonia Lewis, a free Black woman with a Native American mother who overcame the bitter racism of the 19th century and achieved recognition as a sculptor.
According to the USPS website, the face of Lewis on the stamp “is a casein-paint portrait based on a photograph of Lewis by Augustus Marshall made in Boston between 1864 and 1871.”
The stamp is the 45th in the USPS Black Heritage series, which began in 1978 with a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the 19th-century abolitionist who conducted hundreds of slaves to freedom through the network of secret routes and hiding places known as the Underground Railroad.
According to the USPS website and to the website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Edmonia Lewis was born in Greenbush, a location in New York’s Rensselaer County. Her father was Black. Her mother was of mixed descent, partly African and partly of the Mississauga Ojibwe tribe.
Records of Lewis’s early life are sketchy. What is known for certain is that her childhood was spent mainly with her mother’s tribe. She learned fishing, hunting, and Ojibwe crafts like making Ojibwe baskets, embroidered blouses, and moccasins to sell to tourists.
Lewis was accepted into Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1859, age 15. After coping with severe racial prejudice there, she moved to Boston in early 1864, where she found support for her artistic development famous abolitionist writers like William Lloyd Garrison. She studied sculpture and earned money creating portraits of antislavery heroes.
In the middle 1860s, Lewis moved to Rome. The reputation she had established in Boston paved the way for her to start sculpting in marble. Encountering far less racial bias and far more artistic freedom in Rome, Lewis remained there, with her own studio, producing many works for famous patrons, such as a commissioned portrait of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, and a riveting sculpture titled “The Death of Cleopatra,” which is now in the Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.
She spent the last decade of her life in Paris and in England before passing away in 1907.
To find out more about Edmonia Lewis, visit the Joysetta and Julius Pearse African American Museum of Nassau County at 110 North Franklin Street in the Village of Hempstead, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Further events at the museum for Black History Month are:
"Harriet Tubman Herself," a one-woman show by Christine Dickson, Friday, Feb. 25, daytime viewing for students 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.; evening viewing for adults and families, 7-9 p.m.
“Step Into Black History," Fraternity & Sorority Step Competition, 4-8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26. Possible judges are Dorothy Goosby and Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr.
For further information, contact Monet Green at the museum’s number, 516-572-0730.
