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Mary Edmonia Lewis attended Oberlin College from 1859 to 1863. Her time in Oberlin was cut short due accusations that Edmonia Lewis poisoned two of her white classmates. Edmonia Lewis had a successful career as a sculptor, although critics have not always analyzed her work for its intrinsic value.
Graduating from Oberlin in 1957, Sylvia Louise Hill Williams went on to have an illustrious career in Art History. Becoming Director of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1983, she helped move the Smithsonian towards a more culturally nuanced, scholarly, and intersectional perspective of African Artwork.