Harriet Hosmer was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. By the age of 4, her mother and her three siblings died of tuberculosis. Her father, who was a physician, was determined that his only surviving child would be healthy and strong, and from a young age, Hosmer knew to ride, row, and skate. Her father also supported her artistic passion and built her a studio where she sculptured animals from clay. After high school, Hosmer decided to become a professional sculptor, which required both anatomy and art training. Not able to attend medical school and live modeling classes because of her gender, Hosmer took private lessons at the Medical Department of the state university (today the Missouri Medical College) and then studied sculpting with an artist in Boston. At 23, Hosmer realized that she would not be taken seriously as a sculptor in the US, and together with her girlfriend at the time, Charlotte Cushman, moved to Rome, Italy. There, she was accepted to the studio of the sculptor John Gibson and practiced live modeling. She joined a group of expatriate artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and numerous American women such as Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. Together they were known as the Sisterhood of American Lady Sculptors and as the White Marmorean Flock. Six months after she arrived in Rome, Hosmer received her first commission. Not long after, she began working on her first life-size sculpture of Oenone. In 1855, she created a sculpture of Puck, based on the character from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It became one of her most popular pieces, selling 50 copies, one of them to the prince of Wales (later Edward VII). Afterward, Hosmer became a well-known artist both in Europe and in the US, and by 1859, she had earned enough money and secured enough commissions to open a studio of her own and run her business independently. Influenced by the artistic trend of that time, Hosmer sculptured in the Neoclassical style, mostly depicting mythological figures, strong and courageous female characters, such as Daphne, Medusa, and Zenobia – the Queen of Palmyra. At the time, Hosmer met Louisa, Lady Ashburton, a Scottish philanthrope and art collector, who became her life partner for the next 25 years. The couple lived mainly in England, and Hosmer traveled between her studio in Kent and her studio in Rome. In the late 19th century, the neoclassical style fell out of fashion, and Hosmer became focused on designing and constructing new devices to convert limestone into marble, as well as inventing a modeling process in which the shape of the statue is made first in plaster, and the wax coating came second. In 1900, Hosmer returned to the US and settled in Chicago, where she befriended Susan B. Anthony and became involved with the women’s rights movement. Her last work, a sculpture of Queen Isabella of Castile, commissioned by her fellow members at the women’s suffrage group the Queen Isabella Association, was displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In her last years, Hosmer lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, where she died, 78 years old, from respiratory disease. As a successful professional sculptor with international recognition, Hosmer created almost a hundred pieces and became one of the most independent women of her time. She made her mark in art history and paved the way for generations of women who became artists, especially sculptresses. Read more...

Meredith Gang was born in New Jersey to secular Jewish parents who encouraged her to make art and have social awareness. She graduated with a Bachelor Degree in Fine Art from The Cooper Union in 1977 and the following year traveled to Europe, settling shortly in Pietrasanta, Italy to further develop her sculpting skills. The breakthrough came after 20 years of practice when she won her largest public commission, that of the Boston Women’s Memorial. Her work is informed by her timely interest in complex histories, female and racial representation in public spaces. Those themes come across in her public installations such as Countee Cullen memorial in New York Public Library and September 11th Memorial for the Cathedral of St. John. Bergmann won the commission to create the first monument of “real women” in Central Park, NYC, which was dedicated on August 26th, 2020. The monument has gained public attention since, among the 22 historical statues in the Park, there were none commemorating women, only fictional characters like nymphs, Alice in Wonderland, and Mother Goose. The new monument is called “Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument,” devoted to the suffragists Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She started studying poetry at the age of 48. Her poems since appeared in various publications, she served for a decade as the poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly and published a poetry chapbook. Bergmann is married to film director Michael Bergmann, with whom she collaborated as Production Designer. The two have a son and live in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Read more...

Born in Watertown, Massachusetts to a family of Unitarians and abolitionists. Her interest in the arts began in childhood, first as a poet and later on as a sculptress. At the age of 34, Whitney made her first portrait busts, and at 38, she published a collection of her poems but decided to focus mainly on sculpturing. To get a better understanding of the human body, Whitney moved to New York to study anatomy at Brooklyn Hospital, and then to Philadelphia to study drawing and modeling. When she was 46 years old, Whitney and her life partner, Abby Adeline Manning, moved to Rome to learn new sculpturing practices and creating art using nude male models (which was considered inappropriate in the US). At the age of 52, two years after she returned to the USA, Whitney started to work on her most famous work – a sculpture of Samuel Adams, located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, DC. As part of the ‘New Women’ Movement, Whitney believed that the best way to express her social and political viewpoint is via art. She created many statues, among them were of leading figures of the Suffrage Movement, such as Frances Willard and Lucy Stone, political figures such as the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, and the philanthropist Alice Tileston Hemenway. Whitney lived an unconventional and independent life, opened her own studios and traveled through Europe and the US. She was an abolitionist and fought for women’s rights. These days her art pieces are presented around the US, in museums and other public spaces. Read more...