Mary Le Ravin (1905 – September 1992) was an African American visionary artist and ordained minister. She was a self-taught artist best known for creating sculptures, jewelry, household items and trinkets out of animal bones, natural materials, and other found objects. Life and work Le Ravin was born Mary Cooper in Natchez, Mississippi and grew up in Jefferson County, Mississippi. She reported being very spiritual and in direct communication with God from a very young age. She told the story of being "showered" by the Holy Spirit while sitting on her porch during a thunderstorm. In another telling of this event, which took place when she was between five and seven years old, a fish fell from the sky and provided her family's dinner that night. Ecstatic experiences informed Le Ravin's early religious life and lifelong ministry. She began collecting bones in childhood. At the age of 16, she met her future husband, Louis Le Ravin, while working as a babysitter for a Creole theatre family in Monroe, Louisiana. Louis, the mixed-race son of a white father and black mother, belonged to a prosperous Creole class Mary had not been exposed to before leaving Mississippi. Despite Louis being 14 years Mary's senior, Mary fell in love with him during their fishing trips together. They married in 1927. Becoming an artist The couple moved to Gary, Indiana around 1936 or 1937 as part of the Great Migration, and Louis went to work in the city's steel mills. Mary ran a boarding house and engaged with church work, first in Baptist churches where she was prohibited from taking on any leadership role due to her gender, then as a Jehovah's Witness. After becoming a Jehovah's Witness, Le Ravin's evangelical efforts took her traveling throughout the U.S. South and Midwest. Though she had made bone trinkets starting in the 1940s, Le Ravin only began creating her art in earnest after her husband's 1956 death in a steel mill accident. Because Louis was light-skinned enough to pass as white and his coworkers had never met her by the time of his death, they were shocked to learn Louis' wife was a Black woman when she came in to sign the papers claiming her husband's pension. After Louis' death, a devastated Le Ravin more consciously engaged the spirit world, especially through dreaming and deep sleep. When one of her tenants reported someone had attempted to