In the late 1990s, a 3,000-pound marble statue of a dying Egyptian queen was found sitting in a municipal storage yard in Cicero, Illinois. Before that it had marked a racehorse’s grave and stood in a saloon. The sculptor behind it, Mary Edmonia Lewis, was once one of the most talked-about artists in America, yet her London grave went unmarked for more than a century. This episode traces the improbable life of a woman of Black and Ojibwe heritage who conquered the white, male-dominated art world of the 19th century on her own terms.

From selling baskets to Niagara Falls tourists to a gold-rush-funded education at Oberlin College, a brutal beating and poisoning trial, a pivot to Boston and a plaster-bust crowdfunding scheme, Lewis eventually settled in Rome and mastered neoclassical sculpture. We look at how she carved her own marble to silence sexist critics, why she gave her African and Indigenous figures Europeanized features, and how The Death of Cleopatra ambushed the sanitized narrative of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

• The Oberlin sleigh-ride poisoning accusation, the mob attack, and her defense by John Mercer Langston, Ohio’s first Black lawyer
• How 100 plaster busts of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at $15 each financed her move to Europe
• Why she rejected the pointing-machine system and carved every inch of her marble herself
• Forever Free, The Arrow Maker, and the strategy of the visual Trojan horse
• The rescue and Smithsonian restoration of Cleopatra, and the 2017 headstone finally placed on her grave