A New Exhibition Explores Edmonia Lewis’s Montana Connection
The two-part show at Bozeman’s Tinworks Art is part of a citywide homage to the late Black and Indigenous sculptor and her ties to the area.
“I think as historians, we spend so much time asking ourselves how someone as prominent as Edmonia Lewis could be overlooked, but there are generations of artists who have been looking closely at her since the 1860s,” Melissa Ragain, the curator of a new exhibition at Montana’s Tinworks Art on the late Black and Indigenous artist’s legacy, tells Hyperallergic.
On view at the Bozeman nonprofit art space through April 2027, Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Legacies of Edmonia and Samuel Lewis bridges the lives, work, and influence of the expatriate sculptor and her benefactor brother, a Bozeman businessman and performer. While the first installment centered on Samuel, the exhibition’s second act, opening October 11, looks to Edmonia.
Organized in conjunction with a separate presentation of Edmonia's original works at Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies, the Tinworks Art exhibition deliberately does not include her artworks, and instead brings together the work of contemporary artists to make sense of her life and legacy. Building upon the works of Edgar Arcenaux, Terry Adkins, Sonya Clark, Maud Sulter, Gisela Torres, and Nate Young included in Act I, the second installment will include Sanford Biggers, Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, Athena LaTocha, and a new commission by Auriea Harvey.
In "Edmonia Triumphalis" (2026), Harvey, who, like Lewis, is a Black Catholic expat artist working in Rome, imagines a speculative tale in which Edmonia travels to Bozeman to visit Samuel. She synthesizes sculptural and research-based processes into an arch formed from local earth and a fountain inspired by the same classical flourishes that influenced Lewis, linking the disparate contexts of Rome and Montana while conveying the ever-contemporary nature of Edmonia’s work.
