Edmonia Lewis’s legacy explored in Montana: second act of “Chisel & Razor” opens on October 11

The two-part exhibition “Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Legacies of Edmonia and Samuel Lewis” at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, is part of a city-wide tribute to the late African American and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis and her connections to the area, as Hyperallergic reports. The first act was devoted to her brother, Samuel, while the second act, which opens on October 11 and runs until April 2027, is devoted to Edmonia.

Curator Melissa Ragain explains: “I think as historians we spend a lot of time asking ourselves how someone as prominent as Edmonia Lewis could have been forgotten, but there are generations of artists who have been looking carefully at her since the 1860s”.

The Tinworks exhibition deliberately does not include Lewis’s own works, but brings together contemporary artists to understand her life and legacy. The second act includes Sanford Biggers, Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church and Athena LaTocha, as well as a new commission by Auriea Harvey, “Edmonia Triumphalis” (2026), which imagines a speculative history in which Edmonia travels to Bozeman to visit Samuel — something that never happened in reality. Harvey, like Lewis, is an African American sculptor who lives and works in Rome.

Alongside it, the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman presents Edmonia’s original works (October 17, 2026 – September 12, 2027).

Context: Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) was the first internationally recognised African American and Indigenous (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) sculptor, who worked in Rome in the neoclassical style; her masterpiece, “The Death of Cleopatra” (1876), was presented at the Philadelphia Exhibition. Her brother, Samuel W. Lewis, a performer, entrepreneur and community leader in Bozeman, financed her career.