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 sile ...