Cleopatra on Loan from the Smithsonian Institution Once Lost, Now-Restored Sculpture on View at Allen by Anne C. Paine | photos by Al Fuchs December 12, 2002   At its 1876 exhibition, one reviewer called Cleopatra "the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section." The statue is on display in the AMAM’s Willard-Newell Gallery through next summer. The Death of Cleopatra, a life-size sculpture by Edmonia Lewis, is on long-term loan to the Allen Memorial Art Museum while its permanent home, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, undergoes a major renovation. Lewis was the first African American sculptor to achieve national and international recognition. Considered one of the artist’s most important works, the two-ton marble sculpture will be on view at the Allen through the summer of 2003. The daughter of an Africa American man and a Chippewa woman, Edmonia Lewis was orphaned at a young age. She entered the Ladies Preparatory Department at Oberlin in 1859 with the help of her brother, but scandal forced her to leave without graduating in 1862. First she was accused of poisoning two white female students and was beaten by vigilantes; John Mercer Langston won her acquittal due to insufficient evidence. Later she was accused of stealing art supplies. Lewis went on to study sculpture in Boston, and after the Civil War she moved to Rome, where she lived and worked until at least 1911. After that date, no records for her can be found. In sculpting this work, "Lewis made a singularly innovative image popular among American sculptors and the public, who were fascinated with death and dying," writes AMAM director Sharon F. Patton in her book African American Art. "Paintings, prints, and sculptures typically show the Egyptian ruler just before she commits suicide, either in contemplative thought or swooning with a reverential gaze, holding the asp as a pin about to prick the exposed breast. Instead, Lewis’ Cleopatra is in a state of disarray, inelegantly slumped upon her throne, with the symbolic cloak of Isis draped about her... Cleopatra does not look at the viewer but gazes away, self-absorbed. The Death of Cleopatra conveys two overlapping and sometimes conflicting stories: assertion of female power and evocation of female vulnerability." Cleopatra was first exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and then at the Chicago Interstate Exposition in 1878. The sculpture was then placed in storage. In 1892, a newspaper reported its appearance in a Chicago saloon. Sometime later, the owner of a racetrack in what is now the suburb of Forest Park obtained the sculpture; he used it to mark the grave of his favorite racehorse, Cleopatra. When the track closed, the sculpture remained on the site, which subsequently became a golf course and then, during World War II, a munitions factory. The U.S. Postal Service built a facility on the site in 1972, and the sculpture was moved to a salvage yard. A fire inspector discovered the statue there in the early 1980s and enlisted his son’s Boy Scout troop to clean and paint it. In 1985, Cleopatra was given to the Historical Society of Forest Park, which in turn donated it to the Smithsonian, where it was restored.