Lewis's sculpture Forever Free was publicly dedicated in Boston, likely the first sculpture by a Black artist celebrating the end of U.S. slavery.
In 1871, Edmonia Lewis's powerful marble sculpture Forever Free (originally titled The Morning of Liberty) was publicly dedicated in Boston, Massachusetts. The work, completed in 1867, depicts a Black man standing triumphantly with a broken shackle raised in his hand, alongside a kneeling woman in an attitude of prayer and gratitude—a direct visual representation of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans following the Thirteenth Amendment.
Art historians and institutions including Artnet News and Encyclopedia.com have cited Forever Free as likely the first sculpture created by a Black artist to explicitly commemorate the abolition of slavery in the United States. This distinction places Lewis at a unique intersection of American art history and the political aftermath of the Civil War, as she used the elite, classically coded medium of white marble Neoclassicism—typically reserved for allegorical and mythological subjects—to memorialize a contemporary Black liberation narrative.
The Boston dedication placed the work before an audience deeply engaged in abolitionist and Reconstruction-era politics, including many of the patrons, ministers, and reformers who had supported Lewis's career from its earliest days. The sculpture remains one of Lewis's most celebrated and frequently reproduced works, and it continues to be interpreted today as a foundational statement of Black artistic self-representation in the post-Civil War United States.