The 81-year-old artist Artis Lane made history several months ago when a sculpture she made debuted at the U.S. Capitol. The bust of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and activist, is the first sculpture of a black woman at the Capitol.
"The world's coming around to seeing black as beautiful," Lane said in an interview at her home in Los Angeles' Fairfax district. "When I came up, they were laughing at darker people."
The campaign to memorialize Truth in the nation's Capitol began more than a decade ago. A self-educated abolitionist who changed her name from Isabella Baumfree, Truth played a large role in the women's suffrage movement and in 1851 delivered the famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at a women's rights convention in Ohio.
Truth, who died in 1883, "encompassed all aspects of a truly free woman," Lane said. "She personified women's rights, equal rights . . . the struggling and understanding that was taken away from us because of slavery."
E. Faye Williams, chair of the nonprofit National Congress of Black Women, which commissioned the work, said many believed that Truth should stand alongside women's rights figures Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in a portrait monument that was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1997.
Congressional legislation to include Truth in that group failed, Williams said. But Congress approved a bill in 2006 to memorialize the black suffragist in a stand-alone sculpture. Williams said Lane was the first choice to produce the work.
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