Known as the “Exposition Girl” for inspiring 1,500 sculptures at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), Audrey Munson was perhaps the world’s first supermodel. Posing for premier artists such as Daniel Chester French, Adolph Weinman, and Alexander Calder — the last shown here working on a figure of Munson for the PPIE — her gold-gilded and polished bronze likenesses still grace buildings across the country a century later, from the State Capitol in Wisconsin to the James McMillan Memorial Fountain in Washington DC to the Longfellow Memorial in Cambridge, MA to the Manhattan Municipal Building in New York.
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