The Permanence of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Painted Plaster
From Salon entries brokered by French sculptor Auguste Rodin to U.S. government commissions supported by American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, the African American sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) used white plaster to execute her finished works at the beginning of her 70-year career. Being neither marble nor bronze, however, the material lacked traditional historic significance and lasting power. Furthermore, plaster has the tendency to whitewash a subject, particularly meaningful for an artist focusing on African American themes in the beginning of the twentieth century. Unlike her Neoclassical American predecessors who trained in Italy and prioritized marble, her late nineteenth-century training in the Beaux-Arts tradition in Paris focused on finished works in bronze. After her 1913 over-life sized Emancipation plaster sculpture premiered at the National Emancipation Exposition in New York yet languished in her studio, she painted almost all her plaster work to resemble bronze sculptures and to represent African American subjects, including sculptures never cast, such as In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, 1919 and The Slave Ship, c. 1953, as well as sculptures displayed in public exhibitions, such as Ethiopia, 1921 and Negro Poet (Portrait of Maxwell Nicy Hayson), c. 1920s. Since few of her sculptures were cast in bronze during her lifetime, the color transformation from white plaster to brown patina underlines the importance of materials to establish legitimacy and more importantly to establish connections with the Black experience in U.S. monumental sculpture.
Fuller’s engagement with the European avant garde continued to influence her work and by extension the Harlem Renaissance, an extraordinary creative period centered in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. While her sculptures demonstrate the lasting influence of the academic European figurative tradition, her exploration into expressive modes of representation anticipated modern movements of the twentieth century. By painting her plaster sculptures, she bypassed an expensive process and exercised visual control over the appearance and perception of her work. As a result, she set a precedent among African American sculptors of the Harlem Renaissance including Richmond Barthe, Selma Burke, and Augusta Savage who all chose to paint their plaster sculptures to highlight the Black body.
Today the largest collection of Fuller’s works, including process pieces, maquettes, tools, paintbrushes, and paint, are on permanent display in open storage at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA, where she settled with her husband in 1909. Although the majority of the sculptures are in plaster, they appear as finished bronzes in the way she skillfully painted them in browns, greens, and gold. Moreover, they acknowledge the racial empowerment to depict brown skin at a time of increased violence against African Americans in the United States. Examining so-called transitory yet pivotal sculptures demonstrates Fuller’s enduring legacy.
Key words: sculpture, United States, race, African American, Harlem Renaissance
Selected Bibliography
Armstrong, Julie Bucknor. “‘The People… Took Exception to Her Remarks’: Meta Warrick Fuller, Angelina Weld Grimké, and the Lynching of Mary Turner.” The Mississippi Quarterly 61, no. 1/2 (2008): 113–141.
Ater, Renée. Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Beach, Caitlin. “Meta Warrick Fuller’s Mary Turner and the Memory of Mob Violence.” NKA (Brooklyn, NY) 2015, no. 36 (2015): 16–27.
Blake, Jody. Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
Boime, Albert. The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory.” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1368–1400.
Cohen, Joshua I. The "Black Art" Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.
Copeland, Huey. “Making Black Feminist Art Histories.” American Art 31, no. 2 (2017): 27-29.
Davidson, Benjamin and Pippa Biddle. “The Sculpture of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller.” Antiques. (September / October 2020): 34-40.
Farrington, Lisa. African American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller papers, New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York, NY.
The Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Haygood, Wil. I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100. New York: Rizzoli, 2018.
Kerr, Judith Nina. “God-Given Work: The Life and Times of Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877-1968.” Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1987.
Leininger-Miller, Theresa. New Negro Painters and Sculptors in Paris: African-American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Miyatsu, Tami. Bodies That Work: African American Women’s Corporeal Activism in Progressive America, New York: Peter Lang Inc. International Academic Publishers, 2020.
Nelson, Charmaine, A. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2007.
Oden, Krissi. “Interpreting Space: The Rebirth of Meta Warrick Fuller” University of Toronto Art Journal 2 (2009): 41-51.
Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Timreck, Lee Ann. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023.
Wilks, Jennifer M. “Black Modernist Women at the Parisian Crossroads,” in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem, ed. Davarian L Baldwin and Minkah Makalani. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Erika Schneider
2 Barker Lane, Framingham, MA 01701; 774-251-8133
eschneider@framingham.edu
Education
Ph.D. in Art History, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, May 2007
M.A. in Art History, Boston University, Boston, MA, 1993
B.A. in French and Art History, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, 1991
Postdoctoral Awards
Digital Humanities Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities American Rescue Plan, Framingham State University, fall 2022, Created Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller Database, online catalogue raisonné http://omeka.flo.org/fsu/s/Meta-Vaux-Warrick-Fuller-Database/page/welcome
Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Short-Term Fellowship, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY, August 2022
Inclusive Excellence Award, Framingham State University, June 2022
Distinguished Faculty Award: Excellence in Scholarship, Framingham State University, May 2019
Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, summer 2017
Fulbright-Terra Foundation Award in the History of American Art, Radboud University, Netherlands, fall 2015
Academic Affairs Travel Grant, Framingham State University, 2014
Whitney Travel Grant, Framingham State University Alumni Association, 2011
Faculty Research, Teaching Innovation, Travel Awards, Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching, Scholarship and Service (CELTSS) Framingham State University, 2008-2023
Current Employment
Full Professor, Art Department, Framingham State University, Framingham, MA, 2018-present
Associate Professor (Tenured), 2013-2017
Assistant Professor, 2007-2013
•Taught fifteen-week courses on history of art I and II, modern art history, contemporary art history, graphic design, American art, film, and museum studies, Symbolism seminar
•Directed studies on modern architecture, New Deal murals, street art, contemporary portraiture, contemporary photography
•Coordinator of museum studies minor, supervised museum internships
•Designed Art Department Study Tours to London-Paris, May 2014; Amsterdam-Paris, May 2017; Munich, Prague, Berlin, May 2018; Italy, May 2019
Selected Publications
“Asserting Agency: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Scrapbook,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 2 (Fall 2022). https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.15090
“Shot through the Heart, the Woman is to Blame: Philip Leslie Hale Performs a Symbolist Game” in Locating American Art: Finding Art's Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Cynthia Fowler, Ashgate Press, January 2016.
The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800-1865, University of Delaware Press/Rowman and Littlefield, May 2015.
“Against the Tide: Paul Gauguin’s Watery Women and Their Symbolist Legacy” in Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences, ed. Rosina Neginsky, Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
Selected Public Lectures
“Inclusive Nation Building in the United States: Meta Vaux Warrick's Public Monuments,” co-presented with Dr. Emily Burns, The Vigeland Seminar 2023: Boundaries or no Boundaries–Sculpture in the Intersection between Nationalism and Internationalism, Oslo, Norway, June 12-13, 2023
“Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and the International Origins of the Harlem Renaissance” in "Significant Findings:” Object- and Archives-Based Reassessments of US Art (colonial-1945) panel, College Art Association, Annual Conference, New York, NY, February 15-18, 2023
“Meta Space and Mimesis: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Studios” at “Gustave Courbet, l’atelier sans fin,” Colloquium, Organized by Musée et Pôle Courbet and Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Ornans, France, March 11-12, 2022
“John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Rome, Italy, June 14, 2018
From Salon entries brokered by French sculptor Auguste Rodin to U.S. government commissions supported by American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, the African American sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) used white plaster to execute her finished works at the beginning of her 70-year career. By later painting her plaster sculptures, she bypassed an expensive process and exercised visual control over the appearance and perception of her work. Moreover, the influential painted plasters acknowledge the racial empowerment to depict brown skin at a time of increased violence against African Americans in the United States.