The Statue of Liberty pin at her collar is not incidental: Madeleine Albright turned brooches into a working diplomatic language, choosing which pin to wear as a deliberate signal to the foreign officials she met with — a snake when Iraqi state media called her one, a shattered-glass pin, reportedly, on the day she was confirmed as the highest-ranking woman in US government history. That last image is rendered literally in the collage behind her, a wall of cracked mirror standing in for the ceiling she broke. Albright's family fled Czechoslovakia twice — first the Nazi invasion, then the Communist takeover — before she built one of the most decorated careers in American diplomacy: honors graduate of Wellesley, a Columbia PhD, UN Ambassador under Bill Clinton, and in 1997 the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. In that role she pushed for NATO expansion, advocated for human rights and democratic transition abroad, and made women's issues a stated priority of American foreign policy, a rare explicit link between gender and statecraft at that level of government. After leaving office she kept the same pace: six bestselling books, a private investment fund, a genocide-prevention task force, and an institute bearing her name at Wellesley. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. She wrote her own account of the pins in a book called Read My Pins — proof that even her accessories were doing political work most diplomats leave to words alone.