Meta Warrick Fuller: Public Sculpture and Private Vision

FAIN: FA-50246-04

Renee Deanne Ater
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) created sculptures that reveal her concern and interaction with the pressing cultural and political issues of her day including emancipation, suffrage, immigration, peace, and anti-lynching. I seek funding to support the completion of my book on Fuller. My project places Fuller within the important cultural and political context of her times. I explore how her art played a role in formulating black identity and in conceptualizing civic nationalism through visual means. My project resituates Fuller in the complicated historical past that she occupied, shaped by her identities as an African American, a woman, an artist, a wife and mother, a Victorian, and member of the elite W.E.B. Du Bois called the "Talented Tenth." My work embraces Fuller's biography but moves beyond it to incorporate Fuller's art as a way to access her complicated role as artist and citizen in the period from 1907 to 1921. My project addresses two important questions to Fuller's art: "what do the sculptures reveal to us of the artist's convictions?" and "what do the sculptures tell us about the conflict between civic nationalism and the formulation of black identity in the early twentieth century?" My study considers why Fuller's work was important during her day and why her art continues to resonate in the present. I offer a conceptual framework that allows Fuller to exist in her own right.

Associated Products

Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (Book)
Title: Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller
Author: Renee Ater
Abstract: This study focuses on the life and public sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), one of the early twentieth century’s few African American women artists. To understand Fuller’s strategy for negotiating race, history, and visual representation, Ater examines the artist’s contributions to three early twentieth-century expositions: the Warwick Tableaux, a set of dioramas for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907); Emancipation, a freestanding group for the National Emancipation Exposition (1913); and Ethiopia, the figure of a single female for the America’s Making Exposition (1921). Ater argues that Fuller’s efforts to represent black identity in art provide a window on the Progressive Era and its heated debates about race, national identity, and culture.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520262126
Primary URL Description: University of California Press
Publisher: University of California PRess
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520262126
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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