Montana Tech engineers have 3D printed a replica of The Death of Cleopatra, Edmonia Lewis’s 1876 marble sculpture, for an exhibition at the Museum of the Rockies.
The project joined Montana Technological University, Montana State University and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which owns the original. Lewis, one of the first Black and Native American women to earn international recognition as a sculptor, created the roughly 3,000-pound statue to show the Egyptian queen in the moments after her death. Its dramatic take on Cleopatra drew both praise and criticism at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Then the sculpture vanished from the art world for more than a century. It stood in a Chicago saloon, later marked the grave of a racehorse at a Chicago racetrack, and ended up in a salvage yard. After it was rediscovered in the 1980s, the weathered marble was restored and acquired by the Smithsonian, where it remains in the permanent collection.
MSU professors Dr. Melissa Ragain and Dr. Regina Gee brought the idea of recreating the statue for the museum to the Montana Tech Advanced Manufacturing (MTAM) Research Group. The Smithsonian sent over a high-definition lidar model, and mechanical engineering students Jadon Bingham and Daniel Topp, both class of 2026, set to work with Dr. Nathan Huft.
The team originally planned to print in resin but switched to PLA filament and spread the job across five machines, two Elegoo Centauri Carbon printers, a Creatbot F430NX, a VisionMiner IDEX22 and a Creality Ender V3 Plus. Printing the 115 pieces took 1,150 hours, nearly 48 full days, and putting them together took another 30. MSU’s School of Art then painted and finished the statue.
Much of the craft went into how the model was cut up. Bingham and Topp handled the CAD work, and Bingham estimates he spent 200 to 300 hours at the computer. Both kept going after they graduated in May, with Topp making several trips back to Butte to help with printing and spending a weekend on assembly.
“They did an excellent job with how they sectioned the full statue into parts,” said Huft, who spent much of the build troubleshooting to keep the printers running. “They didn’t just blindly grid it off; they chose specific spots to make the cuts.”
For the students, the payoff was seeing engineering work land somewhere unexpected. “It was a pretty unorthodox project, but I’m glad it turned out as well as it did,” Bingham said. “I don’t think most engineers can say that they’ve worked on anything that’s in a museum.”
The printed Cleopatra is on view in the Chisel and Razor exhibition in Bozeman from October 17, 2026, to September 12, 2027.
Source: Montana Tech
