Shannon Coan reports for the Times Union that Rensselaer County native Edmonia Lewis is being honored with her face on a U.S. Postal Service stamp, with a ceremony Jan. 26 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Lewis was "the first Black and Native American sculptor to earn international recognition" according to the story. “Lewis’s achievements cannot possibly fit on a postage stamp, but I think it’s so fitting to honor her legacy in this way,” said Karen Lemmey, the Lucy S. Rhame curator of sculpture at the museum. “It is collectible and some may wish to collect and preserve it just as we do our sculptures here, but I think Lewis would be equally pleased to know these stamps will be zipping around the country just as she did,” Lemmey added. Lewis was born in 1844 and died in 1907, and spent much of her life in Rome making neoclassical-style sculptures incorporating themes relating to Black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas, according to Wikipedia. At the ceremony this week, the Smithsonian unveiled “The Death of Cleopatra,” one of Lewis’ most well-known works, which had been lost since the 1980s. “It was so thoroughly lost that I, along with most people who were at all interested in finding out about it, feared, for good reason, that it had been destroyed,” said Marilyn Richardson, an art consultant and the person who found the work in an abandoned storeroom at a suburban Chicago shopping mall roughly three decades ago. “It was just an extraordinary thing to find it not only intact but intact and in such condition that it could be beautifully, beautifully restored,” she said. Read more about this story in the Times Union.