break into the house one night, she prayed and heard the Holy Spirit instructing her to create "bone art" as a way of deterring prowlers. Later years In 1968, after being called racial slurs at the county fair in Gary, where she won several art competitions, Le Ravin moved to Los Angeles to be near her sister, Sarah. By the time Le Ravin ended up in California she was an ordained minister. As Mother Mary, she procured free use of a storefront in an area, near the University of Southern California, that housed many black-owned businesses. From this location, she set up an all-in-one thrift shop, art studio, and kitchen for feeding the poor and homeless. Folklorist Daniel Wojcik called this space, where Le Ravin ministered to the people of the neighborhood, a "storefront church". Thus, Le Ravin earned the nickname "47th Street Mama". After some time performing this charitable work, God told her to "Stop feeding them and start preaching". Due to the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake and her declining health, Le Ravin was forced to leave her storefront space, abandoning many unfinished sculptures, barrels of bones, and other materials. Le Ravin regularly displayed and sold her art at local events such as the Los Angeles Street Scene and annual Black Pride Parade. The most significant exhibition of Le Ravin's art career happened during the end of her life when, in 1991, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, exhibited over 150 of her works alongside those of Simon Sparrow and Norbert Kox in a show called Religious Visionaries. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center retains some of Le Ravin's works as part of its permanent collection. Artistic style Le Ravin's religious art reflected her Christian beliefs, personal engagement with the Holy Spirit, and her dreams. She created many articulated puppet dolls who could be made to move like the Holy Ghost. Using her "God-given glue", a mix of Elmer's glue and sawdust, Le Ravin made sculptures and tableaux assembled from bones, beads, glitter, stones, shells, flowers, gum, container lids, plastic wrap, and other natural materials and found objects. She reported that the Holy Spirit guided her to see all sorts of shapes and faces in bones and often focused on religious subjects like Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Most of her works, however, depicted African and African American pop cultural icons and historical figures, such as