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Edmonia Lewis was an African American and Native American sculptor. In 1859, she attended Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College) in Ohio, one of the first schools to accept female and Black students. She developed an interest in the fine arts, but after a series of racially motivated abuses, she left the college before graduating. She traveled to Boston and established herself as a professional artist. She studied with a local sculptor and created portraits of famous antislavery heroes, including John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw. She moved to Rome in 1865, where she became involved with a group of American women sculptors and began to work in marble. While most sculptors at the time hired Italian workmen to create the final marble product, Lewis was unique in that she did the entire process herself.

Her largest and most-celebrated work, The Death of Cleo­patra, was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia after taking four years to complete and weighing three thousand pounds. Lewis created numerous works depicting her African American and Native American ancestries. Her work includes a sculpture of Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant to Abraham’s wife Sarah. Several of her sculptures were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1865). Lewis created at least three figure group sculptures inspired by the poem, each depicting Native Americans.