Edmonia Lewis’s powerful works speak to pressing concerns about aesthetic value, materiality, and the representation of race, gender, and class. Come join a conversation about the extraordinary life and art that Lewis carved during the nineteenth century, featuring a group of art historians, curators, and artists: Caitlin Meehye Beach, Gloria Bell, Jennifer DeVere Brody, and yétúndé ọlágbajú, moderated by Jacqueline Francis. Panelists will focus on Lewis’s Anishinaabe and African American ancestry, her neoclassical marble statues, and her travels throughout America, Europe, and in our local California Bay Area. This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions, on view at the Cantor until Jan. 4, 2026. 

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating. RSVP here.

Image: Artwork by yétúndé ọlágbajú

Panelist Bios

Caitlin Meehye Beach is an Associate Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where her research and teaching focus on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century art in North America and Britain. She is the author of Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (University of California Press, 2022), which was the recipient of the 35th Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art and the Phillips Book Prize. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Decorative Arts Trust, among others. Caitlin is currently writing a book about Asian export art and the making of race in British colonial America and the early U.S.

Gloria Jane Bell is an Associate Professor at McGill University in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. Bell’s scholarly book Eternal Sovereigns (Duke, 2024) investigates the long history of Indigenous artists, activists and travelers in Rome. Her criticism and essays appear in publications such as Wicazo Sa Review, First American Art Magazine, Journal of Global Catholicism, KULA, and Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy. She has received many prestigious awards including two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grants, an FRQSC (Fonds québecois de la recherche sur la sociéte et la culture) New Researchers Award, and the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.

Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.  Her books, all published by Duke University Press, include Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (1992), Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (2008) and the forthcoming, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (2026).  Her recent scholarship has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation and various fellowships from Stanford.  She serves as a Guest Curator for the exhibition Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions at the Cantor Arts Center. 

Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, curator, and educator. She is Dean of the Humanities & Sciences Division and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Cultural Studies at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. She is author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), and co-editor of several books, including Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023) and Romare Bearden: American Modernism (2011). Francis co-curated the Huntington Art Museum’s exhibition Sargent Claude Johnson (2024). Among her other curatorial projects are Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life (2023, Museum of Craft & Design, San Francisco) and You Will Not Be Forgotten: New Work by Adia Millett (2024, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong). Francis is the Secretary for the National Committee for the History of Art (the US affiliate of the Comité International d'Histoire de l’Art), and she serves on San Francisco’s Asian Art Commission.

yétúndé ọlágbajú is a research-based artist, creative producer, and cultural strategist living on Ohlone and Tataviam lands (Bay Area and Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together? With no set answers or expectations, ọlágbajú unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are transformed by what we confront in the reckoning.  Inspired by the unnameable and the everyday within Black diaspora, they use the sonic, the sculptural, and the collaborative in order to untangle threads of possibilities, in the wake of the reckonings. Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting power hoarding—one of its guiding tenets.

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Parking

Free visitor parking is available along Lomita Drive as well as on the first floor of the Roth Way Garage Structure, located at the corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way at 345 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, the Cantor Arts Center is about a 20-minute walk or the free Marguerite shuttle will bring you to campus via the Y or X lines.

Disability parking is located along Lomita Drive near the main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center. Additional disability parking is located on Museum Way and in Parking Structure 1 (Roth Way & Campus Drive). Please click here to view the disability parking and access points.

Accessibility Information or Requests

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu or Kwang-Mi Ro, kwangmi8@stanford.edu, (650) 723-3469.

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