Moving Stones explores the extraordinary life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the Black and Ojibwe sculptor who rose to international fame in the nineteenth century. Blending biography, history, and theory, Jennifer DeVere Brody approaches Lewis’s legacy through a Black feminist and queer lens, illuminating how her sculptures and self-fashioning challenged constraints of her time. Living much of her life in Rome as a free Afro-Native woman, Lewis used neoclassical forms to carve out a life in art. Brody considers how Lewis’s works were viewed historically and how they resonate with postmodern artists, engaging themes of race, materiality, sexuality, and embodiment. Rethinking one of the most important sculptors of her era, Moving Stones shows how Lewis’s art continues to inspire contemporary artists and scholars today.

Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies as well as African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play and Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture and the co-editor of James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, all of which were published by Duke University Press.