It was late December 1865, and the United States was still smoldering after five years of civil war. That winter, sculptor Edmonia Lewis stepped onto the streets of Rome and into a new world of possibilities. Thanks to the support of Black and white abolitionists from Boston who funded her travels to Europe, and to the warm welcome of an international community of artists, she began a storied life in the Eternal City. Within only a few years of her arrival in Italy, Edmonia Lewis would become the first Black and Indigenous woman artist to achieve widespread international acclaim.

Opening at PEM in February 2026, Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone is the first comprehensive survey of the sculptor’s remarkable art and life. 

Lewis’ ties to Boston are well known: She arrived in the city in 1863, following the advice of abolitionist Frederick Douglass to “seek the East,” and began her pursuit of an artistic career. A hotbed of antislavery activism, Boston was a place where Lewis could stake her claim as an artist of color with a powerful point of view. 

The space was just off the Piazza di Spagna, in a neighborhood where many American artists, including leading woman sculptors like Harriet Hosmer, had their studios, and where patrons such as the American actor Charlotte Cushman often circulated in their efforts to promote expatriate artists back home. Among other commitments of support to Lewis, Cushman organized a fundraiser to donate a copy of Lewis’ Old Arrow Maker to the YMCA of Boston in 1867.

No longer a stranger in a new city, Lewis would sit down with the Williams sisters, Freeman and several others for Christmas dinner in December 1865 as a new member of this sisterhood of American artists. Through their friendship, her sculpture became another living link between Salem, Greater Boston and the international art world.

A painting in PEM’s collection by Mary Elizabeth Williams further conveys the Williams’ and Lewis’ shared connections to the American expatriate community in Italy. In The Falls of Tivoli, Italy, Mary Williams shows the famous waterfalls that tumble over terraced hillsides into the Aniene River as it threads through the landscape northeast of Rome. The town itself, perched dramatically over cliffs, is visible in the middleground. Lewis spent time in Tivoli on multiple occasions. As Freeman recounted in other letters, Lewis often traveled there with fellow Roman Catholic expatriates like Isobel Curtis Cholmeley, who would serve as Lewis’ godmother at her baptism, and Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a close friend of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, who was himself a Catholic convert. These excursions to Tivoli, likely filled with rich conversation and beautiful music, mirrored the much more modest gatherings that Lewis hosted in her own apartment in Rome — gatherings that the Williams sisters, Freeman and others attended where, after serving her guests a meal, Lewis often took out a guitar and sang for her friends.

After her move abroad, Lewis would also befriend Sarah Parker Remond and Caroline Remond Putnam — fellow expatriates living in Italy, and mutual friends of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who visited them all on his European honeymoon in 1887. Once again, Lewis’ story reveals Salem as a place where the local and global intersect. For Lewis, several friendships at some of the most pivotal moments in her career trace their way back to this small town on Boston’s North Shore.

Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone opens on February 14. Join us on opening day for “Whose Memory Do You Carry?”, an artist and curator talk about Lewis’ legacy. 

The exhibition is co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation, and Karla and Jeff Kaneb. We thank Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, The Creighton Family, Chip and Susan Robie, Karla and Jeff Kaneb, Timothy T. Hilton, and an anonymous donor as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.