by Emily Burkhart
March 22, 2023
Ethiopia (Ethiopia Awakening), Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, ca. 1921. Bronze, height 67 x 16 x 29 in. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
She was a multi-talented artist whose gifts included painting, writing poetry, and theatrical set and light design. But Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) is perhaps best known today for her often metaphorical sculptures focusing on the African American experience. A protégée of renowned French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Fuller has been called “one of the most imaginative Black artists of her generation.” Her work anticipated the Afrocentric and Pan-African themes of the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1935). In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s recall Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and her pioneering contributions to African American art.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller photographed by Benjamin Griffith Brawley for Women of Achievement: Written for The Fireside Schools Under the Auspices of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1919. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Early Life
The youngest of three children, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was born into a middle class family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 9, 1877. Her mother was a beautician and accomplished wigmaker who owned a salon serving wealthy white women while her father was a barber who owned several barber shops and was also involved in catering and real estate. Due to her parents’ financial means, Fuller received educational opportunities and cultural enrichment not open to many African-American children, including training in art, music, dance, and horseback riding.
Fuller’s love of art began early. Her older sister Blanche studied art, and kept supplies including clay that Fuller used as a child for her own creations. She accompanied her father, who was interested in sculpture and painting, to exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. They also attended the theater, piquing her interest in the dramatic arts. And, her brother William Henry and her grandfather would regale her with horror stories and folk tales that shaped her imagination and later her sculpture, notably Man Eating His Heart (ca. 1900/1901 sometimes called Secret Sorrow), The Wretched (1902),Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War (1917), and Talking Skull (1939).
Education
Fuller took weekly courses at an industrial arts school, while attending a segregated Black public high school in Philadelphia.Her artistic career began after one of her high-school projects was chosen to be included in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At eighteen she won a three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts, a private art college in Philadelphia where she became interested in sculpture and was one of just a few Black students. She graduated with honors in 1898 and received a one-year graduate scholarship. Encouraged by her sculpture teacher, Fuller sailed to Paris where African Americans faced fewer restrictions to attend art academies than in the U.S.
Paris, 1899-1903
Fuller arrived in Paris in late October 1899 to begin study at L'École des Beaux Arts. Before embarking, Fuller had contacted the American Girls Club and received approval to stay there during her sojourn in Paris. When she arrived, she found prejudice had followed as she was turned away by the director who told her girls from the south also staying there would object to her color. Instead, she found lodging with the African American expat painter and family friend Henry Ossawa Tanner and his wife. The director of the American Girls Club did introduce her to French artists Raphaël Collin, a painter who taught at the Académie Colarossi, and Jean-Antonin Carlés, a sculptor with whom she honed her skills in drawing and anatomy in 1900. She also studied sculpture at L'École des Beaux- Arts. Among Fuller’s best-known sculptural works made in Paris are Man Eating His Heart (ca. 1900/1901), also known as Secret Sorrow, and The Wretched (1902).
Self-Portrait, n.d. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, unfired clay. Dimensions unavailable. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
Man Eating His Heart (Secret Sorrow, ca. 1900/1901)
Fuller’s Man Eating His Heart (Secret Sorrow, ca. 1900/1901) is based on the poem “In the Desert” (1895) by the American poet, novelist, and short story writer, Stephen Crane (1871-1900):
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
After seeing the works of Auguste Rodin at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Fuller departed from the French Beaux-Arts tradition to explore subject matter more expressively as seen in Man Eating His Heart. Unlike the beastly creature described in Crane’s poem, Fuller depicted a moment of human sorrow in the figure of a crouching man with blank holes for eyes holding his own heart and eating it. Rodin was so impressed when he saw Fuller’s work that he was said to have exclaimed: “My child, you are a sculptor; you have the sense of form in your fingers.” With Rodin’s sponsorship, Fuller’s work began to receive recognition, including exhibitions at Solomon Bing’s L’Art Nouveau Gallery of modern art and design in Paris and the Société National des Beaux Arts Salon. In April 1903, before her return to Philadelphia, two of her works, The Wretched and The Impenitent Thief (ca. 1900, now lost) were shown at the Paris Salon in 1903.
Man Eating His Heart (Secret Sorrow), ca. 1900/1901, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Painted plaster, 7 x 3 x 2 in. Image courtesy of the Henri Peyre French Institute, City University of New York, NY.
The Wretched, 1902
The Wretched, 1902, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Bronze, 21 x 17 x 15 in. Collection of the Maryhill Museum of Art, Washington. Image courtesy of Obelisk Art History.
Fuller’s The Wretched depicts a scrum of distressed figures in triangular composition. A man atop the group stares into the distance, another dismayed individual rests his knee on his chin in resignation while several others writhe and twist in pain. A young man, mouth agape reaches out struggling to emerge from the mass of bodies. The French press labeled Fuller the “delicate sculptor of horrors'' for her darkly expressive works such as this one inspired by folklore and mythology.
Return to Philadelphia
Upon her return to Philadelphia in 1903, Fuller established a studio on South Camac Street in a flourishing artistic neighborhood. Unfortunately, the "masculinity and primitive power" of her work that had generated interest and acclaim in Paris did not at home. Gallery owners shunned her on account of her race and gender. Unable to sell her work, she was told pejoratively that her sculpture was “domestic.”
Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, 1907
Fuller’s fortunes began looking up by 1907 when she became the first African-American woman to receive a U.S. government art commission . The Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition commissioned her to create fifteen tableaux of twenty-four inch high plaster figures depicting African American progress since the Jamestown settlement in 1607. Fuller produced the Warwick Tableaux–a ten foot by ten foot series of dioramas consisting of over 100 clothed and wigged figurines, painted backdrops, and architectural models. The dioramas were said to have begun with the arrival of slaves in Virginia in 1619 and went on to chronicle the progress and achievements of African Americans through the years. Fuller received a gold medal for the Warrick Tableaux but, unfortunately, the dioramas no longer exist.
Marriage and Move to Massachusetts
In 1909, Meta Vaux Warrick married Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller (1872-1953) a Liberia-born neurologist and psychiatrist at Massachusetts Hospital known for his work with Alzheimer's disease. The couple settled in the predominantly white neighborhood of Framingham. Together, they had three sons, Solomon Jr., William Thomas, and Perry, the youngest, who went on to become a sculptor himself. After marriage, Fuller’s output slowed considerably as she worked to balance the roles of artist, mother, and wife.
1909 Philadelphia Warehouse Fire
Shortly after the birth of her first son, Solomon Jr. in 1910, a fire at the Philadelphia warehouse where Fuller kept tools and stored paintings and sculpture destroyed much of the work she had accumulated to that point, including pieces she had completed in Paris. Among her oeuvre, only a few early works stored elsewhere were preserved.
Emancipation, 1913
Following the fire and the birth of her first child, Fuller had set aside sculpture, but in 1913 she created Emancipation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation for the New York celebration of the 1863 abolition of slavery. She made the statue in plaster, calling it Spirit of Emancipation. This allegorical work features male and female figures emerging from the Tree of Knowledge at the center. Semi-nude, they are not being liberated by Abraham Lincoln or a former owner, but self-liberating. In 1999, Emancipation was cast in bronze and installed in Harriet Tubman Park in Boston’s South End. An engraved description from Fuller was added to its base in 2013:
I represented the race by a male and a female figure standing under a tree, the branches of which are fingers of Fate grasping at them to draw them back into the fateful clutches of hatred. Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children who, beneath the gnarled fingers of Fate, step forth into the world unafraid.
- Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
Emancipation, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1913. Cast in bronze in 1999. 84 in. Harriet Tubman Park, Boston. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War (1917)
Another work, Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War (1917) employs allegorical symbols in protest of World War I. Fuller, a community activist and member of the Massachusetts Equal Suffrage League and Peace Movement, evokes the devastation and suffering inflicted by war, using the Classical motif of an equestrian. Straining at the reins with teeth bared and nostrils flaring, the horse of War lifts a front leg as Peace in the form of a rider strains to pull up War as it tramples humanity beneath its hooves. Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War originated as Fuller’s entry in a 1915 competition sponsored by the Massachusetts Branch of the Women’s Peace Party. The Women’s Peace Party invited artists to enter works which they felt best represented the “constructive peace movement.” Fuller won second prize for the work, which critics applauded as one of her best.
In Memory of Mary Turner As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, 1919
In Memory of Mary Turner As A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller, 1919. Painted plaster, 15 x 5 ¼ x 4 ½ in. Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, Boston. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
In Memory of Mary Turner As A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919) was created by Fuller in the year after the savage lynching of Mary Turner, a young Black woman in Lowndes County, Georgia. Turner was eight months pregnant when she was murdered by a white mob after publicly denouncing her husband’s lynching. In retaliation for speaking out, a mob of hundreds captured Turner and hung her upside down from a tree, brutally killing her and her unborn child before setting her body on fire. Fuller portrays Turner cradling a tiny infant in her arms rising above the grasping hands and flame that threaten to engulf her. In Memory of Mary Turner As A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence is considered one of the first works of art created by an African American to depict the utter depravity of lynch mobs.
Ethiopia (Ethiopia Awakening), 1921
Ethiopia (Ethiopia Awakening), Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, ca. 1921. Bronze, height 67 x 16 x 29 in. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
Fuller sculpted probably her most well-known public work, Ethiopia (later called Ethiopia Awakening), for the 1921 America’s Making Exposition at the Armory in New York City. The two-week exposition was intended to celebrate the contributions of the nation’s immigrants. W. E. B. Du Bois organized the “Americans of Negro Lineage” section of the exposition. He commissioned Fuller “to create an artwork that would symbolize the musical and industrial contributions of African Americans to the development of the United States.” Fuller opted to go in a different direction with Ethiopia, portraying an African woman wearing a neme, the crown of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, as she emerges from a sarcophagus wrappings still covering her legs and feet. At the time Fuller created Ethiopia Awakening, only Ethiopia of all the African nations had successfully maintained its independence against European imperialists. Created at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Ethiopia is widely considered the first Pan-African American work of art and among the first American artworks to reflect the influence of African sculpture.
Talking Skull, 1939
Talking Skull, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1939. Bronze, 71.7 x 101.6 cm. Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, Boston. Image courtesy of Obelisk Art History.
Talking Skull (1939) depicts a young man in a loincloth kneeling on the ground contemplating a skull. Now in the collection of the Museum of African American History in Boston, the inspiration for this sculpture may have come from an African folktale. As the story goes, a man comes across a skull in the forest who warns him, “tongue brought me here and if you are not careful, tongue will bring you here.” Returning to his village, the man reports his find to fellow tribesmen and brings the chief and other villagers to see the skull, but it will not speak. Thinking he has been deceived, the chief beheads the man on the spot for lying. Later, when everyone has gone, the skull speaks up, “tongue brought me here and I told you that if you were not careful, tongue would bring you here.” Fuller used the folktale as a cautionary tale for her children. Other interpretations of Talking Skull suggest it represents the desire for communication between the living and the dead or the African American longing for connection to an African ancestral past.
Illness and Late Career
By the 1940s, Fuller’s husband was in declining health and going blind. Her output diminished as she nursed him until his death in 1953 at the age of 81. Afterward, she herself became ill with tuberculosis and spent two years at a sanatorium where she wrote poetry, being too frail to create more than a few small sculptures. By 1957, Fuller was able to resume working, and though in her 70s, she returned to making art full-time. In the 1960s, she created many sculptural tributes to civil rights icons such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. For her lifetime achievements, Livingstone College, her husband’s alma mater in Salisbury, North Carolina, awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters in 1962. Additionally, the city of Framingham posthumously dedicated a public park in honor of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Solomon Carter Fuller in 1973.
Legacy
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s work celebrated African American heritage and cultural identity. She resisted the stereotypical representations of the black body that pervaded popular culture of the time. She died in 1968 at the age of 90. Since then, museums in Framingham and Harlem have mounted retrospectives of her work. Fuller is celebrated as the first black American artist to draw heavily on African themes and folk tales for her subject matter and is generally considered one of the first African-American female sculptors of importance. In 2015, the Danforth Museum in Massachusetts received a $40,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to safeguard Fuller’s work. Despite decades facing racism and sexism, Fuller defied gender norms to explore the struggles and triumphs of African American experience at a time when the arts were not hospitable to women.
In celebration of Women’s History month, I encourage you to look up the inspiring work of this little-known African American artist and others like her. Please share this article if you found it rewarding.