Unsettling The Indian Museum In Rome: Ferdinand Pettrich and Edmonia Wildfire Lewis

The first chapter establishes historical precursors to the Vatican Missionary Exposotopm by placing the sculptures and life experiences of Ferdinand Pettrich, a white German artist, into productive comparison with those of Edmonia Lewis, an Ojibwa and African American artist. By assessing the two artists, who both lived in Rome during the late nineteenth century, and analyzing their work, the chapter unsettles core colonial assumptions in studies of neoclassical art: that Indigenous peoples belonged in the past, had no place in the future, and existed only on the margins of civilization. Comparing Pettrich's and Lewis's lives and artworks challenges the binaries of past/present, wild/civil, and Indigenous/settler. Their relationship has not been documented in the colonial archive, and the consideration of the two artists together constitutes an intervention in art history. Staging creative dialogue between Lewis's artworks and life and Pettrich's “Indian Museum” extends conceptions of Indigeneity as a state of survival amid the violence of colonial rule.