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      Panel Discussion

      Edmonia Lewis: An Artist in Community

      Saturday, March 21, 2026 from 1—2 pm

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      Panel Discussion: Edmonia Lewis: An Artist in Community

      Know before you go

       

      Location: Morse Auditorium
      Included with admission. Preregistration encouraged. 

      Henry Rocher, Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907) (detail), about 1870. Albumen silver print on card. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, Bequest of Evert Jansen Wendell, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010.67.

      Join us for a dynamic interdisciplinary conversation exploring a range of themes in the exhibition Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone. The first Black and Indigenous woman sculptor to achieve international acclaim, Lewis broke social, racial and geographical boundaries through her art. From her childhood navigating the U.S.-Canada border with her Mississauga relatives to her career as a professional artist in Italy, Lewis used art to forge new networks and solidarities that transcended time and space. 

      This panel considers the communities Lewis was a part of during her own lifetime and her enduring legacy today, and highlights new perspectives and discoveries about her that continue to emerge even after the opening of PEM’s exhibition. Our panel guests include historian Tiya Miles, whose prize-winning publications have examined the Black-Indigenous intertwined past; poet Tyehimba Jess, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book Olio (2017) gave voice to Lewis and her sculptures through several poems; and art historian Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), a key contributor to the Said in Stone exhibition catalogue and a scholar of Indigenous and American art. Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, PEM’s George Putnam Curator of American Art and co-curator of the exhibition, will also join the discussion. 

      About our collaborators 

      Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
      Jeffrey Richmond-Moll

      Jeffrey Richmond-Moll joined PEM in 2023 and now oversees an expansive collection that encompasses over four centuries of American art, culture and creative expression. Most recently serving as curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, Richmond-Moll has a wide range of expertise in American art from the colonial era to the late 20th century. He pursues interdisciplinary, experimental curatorial strategies to tell compelling, inclusive stories about our nation’s past, present and future. His highly collaborative practice seeks to forge connections across media and time periods and unlock new ideas about American art and identity. Follow @jrmcurator on Instagram.

      Tiya Miles
      Tiya Miles

      Tiya Miles is a public historian and the author of eight books that explore Black, Indigenous and women’s history; place and environment; and contemporary uses of the past. These works include four prize-winning histories and one prize-winning novel about slavery and its legacies. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes. Her latest work is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her other books include: Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era and the novel The Cherokee Rose. She publishes frequently in national periodicals, and her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation (“genius award”), the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University.

      Tyehimba Jess
      Tyehimba Jess

      Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry: Leadbelly and Olio. Olio received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry and an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series.

      Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan
      Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan

      Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe) is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His work broadly examines the intersections of European/Euro-American and Indigenous North American art and history, and the material legacies of settler colonialism. Zordan's research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Gallery, among others. Currently, he is a Henry Luce/American Council of Learned Societies Pre-Doctoral Fellow in American Art. Zordan is an enrolled member of the Bad River Ojibwe.

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