Hagar

Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture of African biblical heroine Hagar would have been a trenchant metaphor for Emancipation in the post-Civil War United States. Enslaved by biblical patriarch Abraham, Hagar bore his child when his wife Sarah could not. Abraham, partly responding to Sarah’s jealousy, later threw Hagar and her son Ishmael into the desert. The pair was dying of thirst when an angel saved them through the revelation of a sacred spring. Lewis was a Black and Native American woman sculptor whose work used the highly stylized aesthetic of Neoclassical marble to depict African figures from the ancient Mediterranean. Her work formed part of what art historian Judith Wilson calls the development of an “international black consciousness.”

"I have strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered." --Edmonia Lewis, 1871

This sculpture depicts the biblical story of Hagar. A woman is forced into the desert, and an empty water jug sits at her feet. With clasped hands, she prays for her survival and that of her child. She has been exiled by her enslaver Sarah, the jealous wife of Abraham, who impregnated Hagar with their son, Ishmael.

Edmonia Lewis portrayed Hagar as racially ambiguous. Created in the decade following the American Civil War, this sculpture suggests a parallel between Hagar's plight and the realities endured by many nineteenth-century African American women, who were routinely raped and impregnated by their enslavers.

Label text from The Shape of Power: Stories ...