Frank Sinatra's family purchased her portrait of President Kennedy. Rosa Parks asked her to design her congressional Gold Medal. And President Clinton bought her painting of Hillary.
Artis Lane's sculptures and paintings are in the private collections of Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela. She has also created works for Michael Jordan, Quincy Jones and Armand Hammer.
But at 81, Lane is celebrating what may be her greatest commission.
Today, First Lady Michelle Obama will help unveil Lane's bronze bust of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and women's rights activist that will be the first sculpture of a black woman in the U.S. Capitol. The ceremony will take place in Emancipation Hall at the newly opened Capitol Visitor Center.
"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, chairwoman 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.
To help her prepare, Lane collected dozens of photographs and writings from Truth's life. She read one of her favorite quotations aloud last week while she got ready for her trip east.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again. And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
