Harriet Hosmer

This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will join other local institutions in celebrating the life and work of neoclassical sculptor Harriet Goodhue Hosmer with a special exhibition on view May 2 through July 21.

Harriet Hosmer, *Oenone* (1854-55)Neoclassical sculptor Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908) was one of the most successful women artists of her day, described by the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning as “a perfectly emancipated female.” She was also the first woman to study anatomy at what would become the Washington University School of Medicine and produced many of her most significant works — such as the bronze statue of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton in Lafayette Park — for St. Louis patrons. This summer the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will join other local institutions in celebrating Hosmer’s life and work with a special Teaching Gallery exhibition, on view May 2 to July 21.

Harriet Hosmer, Portrait of Wayman Crow, Sr., 1866, Carrara marbleSince its founding in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis has grown from a small private school to one of the nation’s premiere research universities. Influence 150: 150 Years of Shaping a City, a Nation, the World, which opens Sept. 5 at the Gallery of Art, celebrates that journey with hundreds of archival photographs, drawings, posters, letters, scrapbooks and other materials chronicling key events, people and discoveries in the life of the university.