Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

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Warrick created works of the African-American experience that were revolutionary. They touched on the complexities of nature, religion, identity, and nation. She is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing in New York of African Americans making art of various genres, literature, plays and poetry. The Danforth Museum, which received a $40,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to safeguard Warrick Fuller's work, states that Fuller is "generally considered one of the first African-American female sculptors of importance."

In Paris, she met American sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, who became a lifelong friend and confidant. He encouraged Warrick to draw from African and African-American themes in her work. She met French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who encouraged her sculpting. Her real mentor was Henry Ossawa Tanner while learning from Raphaël Collin. It was the "masculinity and primitive power" of her sculptures that drew the French crowds to her work and generated her acclaim. The Paris crowd was astonished that a woman could produce works that depicted such "horror, pain, and sorrow." It was a relief for Warrick that her gender wasn't an inhibitor for how the public reacted to her racially themed pieces, as it would be in the United States. By the end of her time in Paris, she was widely known and had had her works exhibited in many galleries.

Samuel Bing, patron of Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, recognized her abilities by sponsoring a one-woman exhibition including Siegfried Bing's Salon de l'Art Nouveau (Maison de l'Art Nouveau). In 1903, just before Warrick returned to the United States, two of her works, The Wretched and The Impenitent Thief, were exhibited at the Paris Salon.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1903, Warrick was shunned by members of the Philadelphia art scene because of her race and because her art was considered "domestic." However, Fuller became the first African-American woman to receive a U.S. government commission. For this award, she created a series of tableaux depicting African-American historical events for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Norfolk, Virginia in 1907. The display included fourteen dioramas and 130 painted plaster figures depicting scenes such as slaves arriving in Virginia in 1619 and the home lives of black peoples.

Mary Turner was her response to the 1918 lynching of a young, pregnant black woman in Lowndes County, Georgia. Fuller's contemporary, Angelina Weld Grimké, wrote the short story "Goldie" based on this murder. Warrick's activism also spanned into feminist work. She participated in the Women's Peace Party and the Equal Suffrage Movement, but abruptly stopped once she realized that black women were not included in the fight for equal voting rights. She often sold pieces to fund voter registration campaigns in the South.

Warrick exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1906. She exhibited there again in 1908. In 1910, a fire at a warehouse in Philadelphia, where she kept tools and stored numerous paintings and sculptures, destroyed her belongings; she lost 16 years' worth of work. Among her oeuvre, only a few early works stored elsewhere were preserved. The losses were emotionally devastating for her.

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