Moving Stones

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.

“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

• List of Illustrations xiForeword xvIntroduction 11. A Head of Her Time 21Interlude: Faith Ringgold 482. Animating Stones 57Interlude: Beverly Buchanan 693. With Holding Hands 73Interlude: Kent Monkman 1014. About the Nude 105Interlude: Mickalene Thomas 1355. A Rose Somebody Knows 139Interlude: Simone Leigh 1526. About Photography 161Interlude: Zanale Muholi 1867. Engraving Edmonia 191Interlude: Maud Sulter 207Afterword 215Acknowledgments 217Notes 221Bibliography 257Index 279