Edmonia Lewis is considered the first professional BIPOC sculptor in the United States and the first to achieve international acclaim. Even though much of her work has not survived into the 21st century, Lewis used her art to depict the stories of women and Indigenous people with reverence and beauty. Shattering gender and racial expectations in the 19th-century U.S., her life story is a testament to the ability to succeed despite adversity.
Selma Burke discovered her love for sculpture as a young child and followed her passion to Harlem Renaissance New York, Parisian art studios, and even the White House. The artist behind President Franklin Roosevelt’s image on the dime, she was a dedicated art teacher and one of the most notable sculptors of the twentieth century.
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist, best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art. Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker, and explored themes such as domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious, as well as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She considered art therepeutic, and used her work to process difficult events from her childhood. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not officially affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
With the rise of feminism in the United States, her work found a wider audience. Although she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois’s subject was usually the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso self-portrait (1963-1964), and Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the female body. In the late 1960s, her imagery became more explicitly sexual, in works such as Janus Fleuri (1968), as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. “My work deals with problems that are pre-gender,” she wrote. “For example, jealousy is not male or female.” Despite this assertion, Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard’s 1976 book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art and the sculpture became an icon of the feminist art movement
Perhaps best known as the the long-time lesbian partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, sculptor and translator Una Troubridge was an educated woman with achievements in her own right. She was a successful translator and the first to translate the works of French writer Colette for English readers. Her talent as a sculptor led the renowned ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky to sit for her several times. She and Radclyffe Hall were also known for being interested in spiritualism, and hosting seances.
Luisa Ignacia Roldán was a Spanish sculptor of the Baroque Era, and the first woman sculptor documented in Spain. She is recognized by the Hispanic Society Museum as “one of the few women artist to have maintained a studio outside the convents in Golden Age Spain”. Like many other prominent female artists, she was trained by her father, with whom she collaborated. She combined a specialty in small polychrome terracotta figures – unique for its time – and carved wood reliefs. She struck out on her own in 1671, when she married against her parents’ wishes, and established an independent workshop with her husband. Around 1686, she moved to Cádiz to complete a cathedral commission, then relocated to Madrid in 1688 and boldly petitioned the king for the position of court sculptor (“Escultor de Cámara). The petition was granted in 1692 and she held the post until her death twelve years later. Like many artists of her time she died poor, signing a declaration of poverty shortly before her death. On the day she died, Roldan received the title of “Academician Merit” from Rome’s Academy of Saint Luke in Rome.
Her works are distinctive, possessing “clearly delineated profiles, thick locks of hair, billowing draperies, and mystical faces with delicate eyes, knitting brows, rosy cheeks, and slightly parted lips.” Roldán was a prolific sculptor. Much of her work was religious sculpture for churches, and she also made small terracotta works in the forms of religous scenes, human forms and animals that were popular with the petty bourgeoisie and could be used for personal.