Meta
Vaux Warrick
Fuller
Sculptress Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller celebrated Afrocentric themes through her arts. She was born Meta Vaux Warrick on June 9, 1877, in Philadelphia, PA. Her mother was a skilled wig maker and beautician for wealthy White women, and father owned several barber shops. She was named after Meta Vaux, the daughter of Senator Richard Vaux, who was one of her mother's customers. Because her parents were successful, Meta had many chances to learn and experience culture. She studied art, music, dance, and horseback riding. Her family was well-respected in the African-American community and Meta's parents found success, even around Jim Crow laws. Meta's father, who liked sculpture and painting, took her to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
In 1893, Meta studied art while attending the Girl’s High School in Philadelphia, a Black segregated public school. During the year, she exhibited a high school art project and it was chosen to be in the World’s Columbian Exposition. As a result, she received a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum & School of Industrial Art taught by J. Liberty Tadd. Here, Fuller’s passion for creating sculptures developed. She sculpted pieces that were influenced by the powerful images of the Symbolist era. She sometimes created literary sculptures and sometimes portrait art. Meta Vaux Warrick became one of the best artists to show the African American experience in the United States.
She earned a diploma and became a certified teacher in 1898, and made plans to sail to Paris the next year to pursue postgraduate art studies. She studied sculpture and anatomy at the Académie Colarossi. Meta made arrangements to stay at the American Girls’ Club while overseas. But after sailing across the Atlantic, she was refused lodging by the director of the boarding house due to her skin color. Meta found other accommodations and the director of the boarding house introduced her to various art teachers. In Paris Fuller studied with sculptors Raphaël Collin and Jean-Antonin Carles. While studying with Collin, Fuller was mentored by painter Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Meta was studying in Paris when the World's Fair opened in 1900. World fairs were places where African American’s felt they could set the record straight about their education and contributions to literature, the arts, and music. One of the American Negro Exhibit at the world’s fair included W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He invited Fuller to create displays celebrating Black history. They assembled dioramas that were scenes of Black life with statistical information to prove the advancement of the Black race. Meta's art became stronger in Paris, where she studied until 1902. In her final year in Paris, Fuller visited Auguste Rodin, sculptor of “The Thinker,” taking with her a few of her small sculptors for him to criticize.
When Meta Vaux Warrick left Paris in 1903, she had much of her work displayed in galleries throughout the city including a private one-woman exhibit and two of her sculptures, "The Wretched" and "The Impenitent Thief" were on display at the Paris Salon. At the turn of the 20th century, she had achieved a reputation as the first Black sculptress and was a well-known sculptor in Paris before returning to the United States. Warrick created works of the African-American experience that were revolutionary. They touched on the complexities of nature, religion, identity, and nation. After the success she found in Paris, the reception of her work in America was a disappointment. She was unable to sell her work and told her work was “domestic.”
Due to prevailing racism and gender-based discrimination, Meta was ostracized from the U.S. art scene and was unable to sell her pieces. But like many of her forebears, Meta persevered and was later rewarded. In 1907, Vaux Warrick was the first Black female artist to be commissioned by the U.S. government to do a series of dioramas on the history of African Americans. She depicted scenes beginning with the arrival of slaves in 1619 Jamestown Virginia to others that depicted the lives of Black people through the years. Including slaves at work in a cotton field, gathering of Blacks at the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Black businessman, and ending with a Howard University commencement address given by Frederick Douglas. Meta’s works were ground-breaking at depicting the African-American experience.
In 1909, she married the famed psychiatrist Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, who pioneered Alzheimer’s research. The two settled in Framingham, Massachusetts, and began raising a family. Meta kept creating art, even though some people thought she should just be a housewife after having children. Meta had stored her work and tools after her arrival from Europe and before she was married, with the intention of having them shipped to her in Massachusetts later. Much of Fuller’s early work, and nearly all the work she did in Paris, was destroyed in a 1910 warehouse fire destroying sixteen years of her work. The loss was so devastating, she abandoned art for a few years. What remains are decades of work in plaster, bronze, and on paper that meld together symbolism and the focus on racial issues she was expected to maintain.
In 1913, W.E.B. DuBois wrote to Meta asking her to contribute work to the State of New York. It was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was not the first time DuBois recruited her for a showing of her work. Earlier he had asked Fuller to assist with the “Negro Exhibit” for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. Fuller purchased new sculpting tools and began creating a piece she named "Emancipation Group". The result was Meta’s multi-figure piece titled "Emancipation". The statue shows figures rising up, symbolizing freedom and hope. They are semi-nude, and they are not being liberated by Abraham Lincoln or a former owner. They're self-liberating.
"In Memory of Mary Turner: As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence" was done as a direct response to a 1918 lynching in Georgia. Fuller’s contemporary, Angelina Weld Grimké, wrote the short story “Goldie” based on this murder. Mary Turner was a Black woman and 8 months pregnant when she was lynched by a White mob. The details of her murder are very horrific. Her offense: She spoke out against the lynching of her innocent husband. Because she dared to publicly denounce his murder, a mob of hundreds hung her upside down from a tree and killed her and her unborn child. The Mary Turner sculpture shows Meta Warrick Fuller’s social consciousness. It's considered one of the first works of art to tackle the subject of lynching. Warrick used her platform to address the societal traumas of African Americans.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was deeply influenced by the ghost stories told to her by her brother and grandfather when she was growing up. "Talking Skull", from 1939, shows an African man in conversation with an ancestor. It was inspired by an African fold tale and depicts an African man studying a skull, communicating his thoughts about the mysteries of life and death. "The Talking Skull," was inspired by a folk tale in which a skull warned a young man that "Tongue brought me here and if you are not careful, Tongue will bring you here." Meta was one of the first African-American artists to draw heavily on African themes and folktales and is often referred to as an important precursor to the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement.
Vaux Warrick Fuller sculpted her most well-known public work called "Ethiopia Awakening" for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1921 at the request of W.E.B. DuBois. As the depiction of an ancient Black Egyptian coming back to life, this piece exemplifies a determination to shatter Africa’s association with slavery and ignorance. Ethiopia was inspired by Egyptian sculptures. It is a sculpture of an African woman coming out of a mummy's wrappings, like a chrysalis from a cocoon. This showed her message about Black awareness around the world. Fuller made several versions of Ethiopia. "Ethiopia Awakening" anticipated the Harlem Renaissance’s style and essence and signified the evolution of a new way of Black thinking. At the same time affirming the cultural contributions of African Americans to the United States. This sculpture was in the exhibition's "colored section."
In 1922, Fuller showed her sculpture work at the Boston Public Library. Her work was included in an exhibition for the Tanner League, held in the studios of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. The federal commissions kept her employed, but she did not receive as much encouragement in the US as she had in Paris. In 1928, she took theater classes at Wellesley College and Columbia University. These classes focused on pageants, lighting, and writing plays. After being less active with the CLS, Fuller joined a Black theater company called the Allied Arts Theatre Group (AATG). There, she worked as a head designer, director, and board member. She was involved with the AATG until the founder passed away in 1936. Even with her busy life as an artist and theater worker, Fuller wrote at least six plays. She used the pen name Danny Deaver.
In 1950, Fuller temporarily retired from sculpting to care for her ill husband and to recover from her tuberculosis. Dr. Fuller passed away in 1953. But by the late 1950s, she had returned, creating a bust of educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown and other notable Black women. In the 1960s, Fuller sculpted works that reflected her support of the Civil Rights Movement. Vaux Warrick Fuller reflected the spirit of a woman who created bold, dramatic work that took new chances in African American art. When she chose her subject matter, she was influenced by the songs of African Americans and by African folk tales. They inspired her and gave her insight into the joys and sadness of the human condition.
She was a multi-talented artist who wrote poetry, painted, and sculpted; her "art celebrating Afrocentric themes." The French press named her "the delicate sculptor of horrors" and Auguste Rodin described her as "one of the most imaginative Black artists of her generation." Fuller became one of the most effective chroniclers of the Black experience within the context of the American experience. Her sculptures represented life, nature, religion and the nation. Fuller's work symbolized a new Black identity that was emerging through the Renaissance and represented a source of pride in African and Black heritage and identity. She introduced America to depictions of the African and African American experience that exposed the tragedies but also celebrated the achievements. She was 91 years old when she passed away in 1968.
