Edmonia Lewis's Montana Legacy Reconsidered at Tinworks Art

A new exhibition opening October 11 at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, will examine the legacy of Edmonia Lewis through contemporary artists rather than the celebrated sculptor's own works.

Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Legacies of Edmonia and Samuel Lewis remains on view at the nonprofit art space through April 2027. The show's second act turns to Edmonia, the expatriate Black and Indigenous sculptor, after a first installment centered on her benefactor brother, Samuel Lewis, a Bozeman businessman and performer.

Melissa Ragain, the exhibition's curator, framed the project as a corrective to the persistent question of how an artist of Lewis's stature could have been overlooked. "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," Ragain told Hyperallergic.

That sustained artistic attention is the exhibition's organizing principle. Tinworks Art deliberately excludes Edmonia Lewis's artworks and instead brings together contemporary artists making sense of her life and legacy. The presentation runs in conjunction with a separate exhibition of the sculptor's original works at Bozeman's Museum of the Rockies.

Act I featured works by Edgar Arcenaux, Terry Adkins, Sonya Clark, Maud Sulter, Gisela Torres, and Nate Young. The second installment adds Sanford Biggers, Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, and Athena LaTocha, alongside a new commission by Auriea Harvey.

Harvey's commission carries the closest biographical resonance. Like Lewis, Harvey is a Black Catholic expatriate artist working in Rome. Her installation "Edmonia Triumphalis" (2026) imagines a speculative narrative in which Edmonia travels to Bozeman to visit her brother Samuel. The work synthesizes sculptural and research-based processes into an arch formed from local earth and a fountain inspired by the same classical flourishes that shaped Lewis's own practice.

In doing so, Harvey links two contexts that rarely share a frame: Rome, where Lewis built her career as a neoclassical sculptor, and Montana, where Samuel Lewis established himself as a local figure. The installation also asserts the contemporary currency of Edmonia Lewis's work, positioning her not as a historical curiosity but as a living reference for artists now.

The two-act structure of "Chisel & Razor" mirrors the sibling relationship at its core. Samuel Lewis, a businessman and performer in Bozeman, supported his sister's career from the American frontier while she worked abroad. By devoting an entire exhibition to both figures, Tinworks Art situates the sculptor within a family and a regional history that standard accounts of her life tend to pass over.

With the Museum of the Rockies showing Lewis's original sculptures concurrently, Bozeman audiences can encounter both the historical works and the contemporary responses they have provoked. For a city far from the East Coast museums and Roman studios where Lewis is usually studied, the pairing makes a case that her legacy has been kept alive all along — by artists, in places like Montana, since the 1860s.