
January 20, 2025
The African American Museum in Philadelphia acquired two plaster models sculpted by Harlem Renaissance artist Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller nearly eight years ago. Dejay Duckett, vice president of curatorial services, holds one of the figures.
Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was still a student in Paris when she got a rave review from a master of the medium. Auguste Rodin commended her "sense of form" after meeting her in his suburban studio, proclaiming her a "born sculptor."
The rest of the city would soon share in his assessment. The French press lauded Fuller a "delicate sculptor of horrors" for her twisted, anguished figures. Even after she returned home to Philadelphia, married and started a family further north, she continued depicting the quiet terrors — and triumphs — of being Black in America. Her work helped shape the Harlem Renaissance, even though she never had a New York mailing address.
At least 16 years of Fuller's work was tragically lost to a fire that tore through her warehouse in 1910. The African American Museum in Philadelphia was understandably thrilled, then, when it acquired two small sculptures of hers. The plaster figures are now stored in the Arch Street institute's archives.
"Today there's not that much work that's still available," said Dejay Duckett, vice president of curatorial services. "So we're really happy to have these in our collection."
Fuller was born into a middle class Philadelphia family that understood beauty. Her father owned several barber shops and her mother was a hair stylist and wig maker. Their daughter showed an aptitude for art at a young age, taking lessons in piano, guitar and dance. She won a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art — a forerunner to the University of the Arts — and continued to study in Paris after her graduation.
While abroad, Fuller socialized with the acclaimed Black artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Pennsylvania-born family friend who had relocated to France to escape the racism of his home country. She also became a protege of Rodin after their memorable first encounter. By Duckett's account, Fuller "show(ed) quite a bit" in Paris, cultivating a name for herself in Europe. In 1903, she returned home.
Like Tanner, she found the American art world less receptive to a Black artist — much less a Black woman. Still, she continued to make waves with pieces like her dioramas for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, the first national commission for an African American woman. The series depicted the Black experience in the United States over time, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans at Jamestown to a college commencement at Howard University. It included over 130 plaster figures, all molded by Fuller.
Duckett believes the two pieces in the museum's collection may have come from this work — though audiences wouldn't have seen them in the finished dioramas. The figures are likely maquettes, or rough models for larger sculptures. One appears to be a clergyman tending to his garden, a shovel and flowers gathered at his side. This piece is rendered with rough edges and pops of color.
One of two Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller figures — likely models for larger, finished pieces — in the archives of the African American Museum in Philadelphia.Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
"It's very purposeful," Duckett said. "You'll find this in a lot of her work. There's a piece Talking Skull, which is my absolute favorite of hers. It almost looks as if the piece is kind of rising out of the base. It has those rough edges, the way life has its rough edges. I think she was very aware of that."
The other piece in the museum's collection is a much sleeker figure. Duckett sees parallels between it and perhaps Fuller's most famous work, Ethiopia Awakening. The life-sized bronze sculpture, created in 1921 on a commission from her friend W.E.B. Du Bois, is often linked to the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. It depicts a woman, dressed in the style of ancient Egyptians, looking outward, one hand placed over her chest. The museum's figure is similarly cloaked in a long veil and skirt, its posture producing sharp angles.
This small plaster figure by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller shares some DNA with one of her most famous works, Ethiopia Rising.Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
"Just the flow of the headpiece and the way she renders this fabric, it has a movement even in a small piece that's really quite beautiful," Duckett said.
Fuller moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, after marrying Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, the first Black psychiatrist in America. But she refused to give up her career, even after the couple added three sons to the family. She maintained a studio in their attic and later built a space for herself down the street.
Fuller's work sometimes functioned as protest. The 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a Black woman from southern Georgia who was eight months pregnant at the time of her murder, spurred her to action. Fuller created a painted plaster statuette of a mother cradling her baby, as hands and flames grab at her skirt.
"It's been said that she had a quiet activism," Duckett said. "But I think that the Mary Turner piece speaks volumes. I think it's very, very loud. I think she really put herself in a perilous situation by creating that piece."
In her later years, Fuller dabbled in poetry and theater, handling set design and costumes for local productions. After she died in 1968, much of her remaining work went to the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, while the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired her papers. Pennsylvania erected a historical marker outside her childhood home in Center City.
"She was a voice of her people," Duckett said. "She was a voice of her time. She had the skill, she had this talent, and she used it to say, we are here.
"She decided to do this when a lot of voices around her were telling her, you can't be a sculptor. You're a black woman and your place is here, underneath. She said no to all of that. And she forged her path, which I think is incredible."
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