Abastenia St. Léger Eberle

Abastenia St. Léger Eberle grew up in the Midwest and later moved to New York City, where she studied at the Art Students League. She received immediate recognition for her bronze sculptures and, like many artists at the turn of the twentieth century, found inspiration in New York's urban communities. She depicted immigrant women and children at work and at play in the Lower East Side, Woodstock, and West Village, all neighborhoods and tenements that Eberle herself inhabited. Women's issues dominated her artwork and personal politics, and in 1915 she organized an exhibition of female artists at the Macbeth Gallery to raise money for woman suffrage. Eberle later developed a heart condition that limited her work, but she remained a member of many art organizations and donated twenty-one sculptures to her hometown, Webster City, Iowa.