Meta Warrick Fuller

Edmonia Lewis (1843 or 1845- 1907) was the first internationally recognized African American sculptor. In her early career, she produced medallion portraits of well-known abolitionists. She created most of her large-scale sculptures in Rome, out of Italian marble, and specialized in subjects that represented her African American and Native American ancestry; her father was a free African American and her mother a Chippewa Indian. Few of Lewis’s sculptures have survived.

Learn more about Edmonia Lewis from the Smithsonian Magazine here.

Meta Warrick Fuller was born to a Black middle-class family in Philadelphia. Her mother was a beautician with white patrons, and her father owned a barber shop; both her parents were considered to be influential in African American society.  Warrick received training at an early age in music, art and dance and visited art galleries with her father.

[Image courtesy of New York Public Library]

Warrick traveled to Paris to study art, where there were more opportunities for women and African Americans to pursue careers in the arts. Warrick experienced racism immediately upon her arrival, as she was told that she could not reside or study at the school where she had enrolled, the American Girls’ Art Club, because she was African American. She subsequently found her own housing and other art classes, and would become well known in Paris as the “sculptor of horrors.”

[Image of courtesy of Getty Images]

The 1900 Paris Exposition was a world’s fair that was visited by 50 million people from around the world, which exhibited innovations in art, architecture, engineering and other disciplines. Thomas J. Calloway and W.E.B DuBois designed a segregated area designated for African Americans: The American Negro Exhibit, which illustrated African Americans’ social, economical and political contributions.

Meta Warrick met famous sculptor of bronze and marble figures, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), while in Paris. Rodin is still considered to be one of the greatest portraitists in the history of sculpture. 

Rodin gave Warrick a tour of his studio, and reviewed Warrick’s sculptures, which he said were powerful. Rodin had a great influence on Warrick’s artwork, and inspired her to continue creating sculptures that expressed great emotion and where the artist’s hand was evident in the work.

[Image courtesy of Musée Rodin]

[Image courtesy of Maryhill Museum of Art]

Warrick was ostracized from the mostly male and white art community in Philadelphia and struggled as a result to exhibit and sell her art.

In 1907, Warrick became the first African American woman to receive a federal art commission. She was commissioned to create work for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, the 300th anniversary of the Jamestown Virginia Settlement. “The Warrick Tableaux” presented there featured 12 dioramas that illustrated African Americans’ contributions to education, agriculture, business, the military and more, and was meant to refute stereotypical images of African Americans, and present images of racial progress that celebrated Black identity.

[Image courtesy of Giles B. Jackson and D. Webster Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (Richmond, 1908)]

Solomon C. Fuller, born in Liberia, was the first person of African descent to practice psychiatry in the United States. He is best known for his research on dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Solomon proposed to Warrick after knowing her for just a month, and Warrick responded that she needed a long engagement to develop her art career before marrying. They married three years later and had three children.

[Image courtesy of New York Public Library]

As a result of the Great Migration, Harlem, in New York City, became a cultural touchstone for African Americans. The period between 1910s-1930s in Harlem was described as a time of renaissance and social and artistic explosion, with the creation of literature, music, and art that transformed American culture. During this time period, African American women sculptors created work influenced by Meta Warrick Fuller’s groundbreaking sculptures, including Augusta Savage, pictured here with her sculpture “Harp” (1939).

W.E.B DuBois commissioned Meta Warrick Fuller to create “Emancipation” for The National Emancipation Exposition, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Warrick Fuller’s Emancipation was displayed in the middle of the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, in a pseudo-egyptian temple called the ‘temple of beauty.’

[Image courtesy of National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Museum of Afro American History, Boston]

Warrick Fuller created “Immigrant in America” for the Immigrant in America Contest. The sculpture has since been lost. 

[Image courtesy of The University of Massachusetts]

The 1917 Silent Parade of about 10,000 people along Fifth Avenue in New York was organized by the NAACP to protest the thousands of lynchings that were taking place across the country.

[Image courtesy of Public Domain, sourced from BlackPast.org]

Meta Warrick Fuller created “Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence,” as a tribute to the 1917 Silent Parade and to Mary Turner, a pregnant woman who was lynched in 1918, in Georgia. 

[Image courtesy of Museum of African American History, Boston & Nantucket]

The America’s Making Exposition was a fair dedicated to showcasing immigrants’ contributions to American society, held for two weeks in New York City. Warrick Fuller’s “Ethiopia” stood at the entrance of the fair, and was meant to evoke emancipation through an Egyptian image, drawing on Warrick Fuller’s pan-African influences. Warrick Fuller’s art celebrating Black heritage and identity was groundbreaking for the time, when African Americans were typically depicted in sculptures as slaves or caricatures.

[Image courtesy of New York Public Library]

[Courtesy of University of Massachusetts]

Warrick Fuller’s “Crucifixion” eulogized four girls tragically murdered in the bombing of an African American Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The church bombing was the third in Birmingham in the days following a federal order to integrate Alabama’s schools.

[Image courtesy of Flickr/ArtFan70]

Alison Saar’s sculpture of Harriet Tubman, “Swing Low,” was commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs’ Percent for Art program, and currently stands on 122nd Street in New York City, in Harriet Tubman Triangle on 122nd Street.

[Image courtesy of Alamy]