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Moving Stones

About the Art of Edmonia Lewis

The cover background is a gradient from marroon to black with four lilac flower-like objects at the edges. Centered is a deconstructed collage like photograph of Edmonia Lewis. The bottom half of the figure is distorted creating a wavy psychedellic e

The Visual Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas

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Book

Pages: 310

Illustrations: 48 illustrations

Release Date: June 09, 2026

Author: Jennifer DeVere Brody

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.

Praise

“Moving Stones reimagines the life and legacy of Edmonia Lewis, the first internationally recognized woman sculptor of African and Native descent. Centering the varied notions of ‘about’—movement, distance, desire—the book animates Lewis’s sculptures, archives, and ephemera, while placing her legacy in context with artists such as Faith Ringgold, Mickalene Thomas, Simone Leigh, and zanele muholi. Brody reveals Lewis as an artist always in motion, whose resonance endures today.” - Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging, New York University

“Bold, lyrical, challenging, and clarifying, Moving Stones dares to experiment with form, language, and representation in ways that Edmonia Lewis herself surely would have admired. A uniquely luminous treatment of a famous, yet elusive, Black-Indigenous sculptor whose style has marked contemporary art and Black women’s cultural expression.” - Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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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.

Table Of Contents

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List of Illustrations  xi
Foreword  xv
Introduction  1
1. A Head of Her Time  21
Interlude: Faith Ringgold  48
2. Animating Stones  57
Interlude: Beverly Buchanan  69
3. With Holding Hands  73
Interlude: Kent Monkman  101
4. About the Nude  105
Interlude: Mickalene Thomas  135
5. A Rose Somebody Knows  139
Interlude: Simone Leigh  152
6. About Photography  161
Interlude: Zanale Muholi  186
7. Engraving Edmonia  191
Interlude: Maud Sulter  207
Afterword  215
Acknowledgments  217
Notes  221
Bibliography  257
Index  279

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3852-8 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3363-9 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6212-7 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478062127