Sculptor. Mary Edmonia Lewis, the most famous Black sculptor of the nineteenth century, was born a free black woman around 1844 in upstate New York (in Greenbush, now Rensselaer) to parents of Black and Ojibwe ancestry. She and her older brother Samuel, who became a wealthy barber in Montana after the Gold Rush, were orphaned young and lived for a while with her Ojibwe relatives near Niagara Falls. She attended two unusual schools that accepted Black students before the Civil War: New York Central College in McGrawville (today McGraw), 1856-58, and Oberlin College in Ohio, 1859-63. She left Oberlin after several racist incidents for Boston, where she began to make clay sculptures, got involved with Black and white abolitionist activists, and became regionally famous for a commemorative bust of Captain Robert Gould Shaw. But in 1866, she left for Europe and settled in Rome, then the place to be for sculptors—and one where she encountered much less prejudice as a Black female artist than in the US. In Rome, she began to sculpt in marble; she had many patrons come through her studio for over 20 years, but traveled to the US almost every year to sell her art and work with patrons. In 1876, she exhibited her most famous work, The Death of Cleopatra, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where hundreds of thousands of people saw it. In 1887, Frederick Douglass, whom she had known since her student days, visited her studio on a trip to Europe. However, her fame faded in the 1890s. She moved to Paris, but no work from this time has survived. Sometime later, she moved to London, where she died of Bright's disease (a kidney ailment) in 1907. Edmonia Lewis was almost completely forgotten by then, but determined scholars pieced together her biography in the 1980s, and in 2010, they finally discovered her death date and her gravesite. Her Death of Cleopatra was found badly damaged in a storage shed in Illinois but was restored and is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Art.