Edmonia Lewis, the Greek Slave Statue, and the #SayHerName Movement: (Act One) Kindling the Fire, Hearing Her Voice

Catherine M. Roach; Yolanda M. Manora; Hannah L. Drake

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Chapter 12 Edmonia Lewis, the Greek Slave Statue, and the #SayHerName Movement

(Act One) Kindling the Fire, Hearing Her Voice

In: Disruption and Convergence

Authors:

Catherine M. Roach

Catherine M. Roach
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Yolanda M. Manora

Yolanda M. Manora
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Hannah L. Drake

Hannah L. Drake
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 141–149

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004700994_019

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Abstract

This essay explores questions of erasure and injustice in America and the arts. Our experiment in collaborative writing traces the launch phase of an ongoing multimodal arts-research project.

Through use of indirection, poetry, and imagined narratives, we tell an intertwined story of the sculptor Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis and of Hiram Powers’ statue The Greek Slave. We tell their 19th-century story “slant”—from a creative sideways angle instead of head-on—to show the intersectionality of arts thinking today: how the legacy of slavery endures, how the #SayHerName movement advocates for justice at the intersection of race and gender, how “art’s fiery finger” pokes and prods at these inequities in today’s public art controversies.

The resulting transdisciplinary essay eschews conventional analytical structure. Its meanings accrue through alternating sections written in different registers: (1) lines of Hannah Drake’s poetry on the theme of Saying Her Name; (2) literary fragments about Edmonia beginning her life as an artist and encountering the Greek Slave; (3) narrative vignettes about our efforts at arts activism and epistemic disobedience within the academy, working at the intersections and in the gaps; (4) paragraphs of context about art history and political activism. We suspend closure in favor of open-ended imagination.

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Disruption and Convergence

Generating New Conversations through Arts Research

Series: Doing Arts Thinking: Arts Practice, Research and Education, Volume: 15

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004700994

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 09 Jul 2024

Subjects
- Education
  - Higher Education
  - Art Education

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Chapter 12 Edmonia Lewis, the Greek Slave Statue, and the #SayHerName Movement

(Act One) Kindling the Fire, Hearing Her Voice

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Citation Info

Share link with colleague or librarian

Disruption and Convergence

Generating New Conversations through Arts Research

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