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Located nearby the bustling Boston-Worcester Turnpike is the Framingham Centre Common. The former site of the old town common, it’s dotted with numerous historical buildings and still serves as a meeting place for many public events hosted by the City of Framingham. One historic building is the Jonathan Maynard Building which houses the Danforth Art Museum. Although not as large or renowned as other art museums near the Boston area, the Danforth has something in their collection no other museum has; the largest collection of works by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller who was one of the first Black American female sculptors and the first artist to be commissioned by the U.S. government to do a series of dioramas on the history of African-Americans.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was born in Philadelphia on June 9th, 1877 to a middle-class family in which her mother was a beautician and her father was a barber. During the Reconstruction era, many freed Blacks moved north and Philadelphia became home to a very vibrant Black American community. Her parents were able to find much success with their creative talents and Warrick was able to get an education in many cultural activities such as art, music, dance, and horseback riding. Warrick’s interest in sculpture began at home as her older sister Blanche also studied art and Warrick often visited the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with her father who also had an interest in sculpture and painting.
Warrick’s artistic career began when one of her high school projects was chosen to be displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Afterwards, she was given a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art where she rejected more traditional feminine artistic themes and instead focused more on chronicling the Black experience within the United States. After graduating in 1899, she traveled to Paris where she studied under the tutelage of Raphaël Collin at the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts. Due to racial discrimination, the American Woman’s Club of Paris refused to give her lodging even though she had made reservations beforehand. Thankfully, another prominent Black American artist living in the city Henry Ossawa Tanner, who was a family friend was able to give her lodging and also introduced her to his group of friends. Warrick continued to hone her skills as a sculptor and was deeply influenced by famed Auguste Rodin with his ability to depict human spirituality and suffering and would later become his protégé in 1902. Her sculptures were displayed at numerous galleries in Paris which drew in crowds who lauded and praised her works unperturbed by the fact she was a Black woman. While in Paris, Warrick also met W.E.B. Du Bois who would become a lifelong confidant and friend who encouraged her to draw from African and Black American themes for her work.
When Warrick returned to Philadelphia, much of her work was shunned by the upper-class members of the city who saw her sculptures as grotesque, foreign, and unappealing. However, her work depicting suffering of Black subjects resonated strongly within the African-American community and Warrick became the first artist to be awarded a commission from the US government to create artwork depicting the history of Black Americans. For the upcoming Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907, she created sculptures regarding slavery, African-American life during the colonial era, and the impact of the Civil War. In 1909, she married Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, an immigrant from Liberia and one of the first Black psychiatrists in the United States. They settled in Framingham, Massachusetts becoming one of the first Black families in the community and despite societal expectations for a woman to settle down and become a housewife, Fuller remained very active in the artistic community. In 1910, a fire in a Philadelphia warehouse destroyed a large number of artworks made by Fuller resulting in her losing about 16 years’ worth of work. As a result, she built a studio in the attic of her home where she created all future art throughout the rest of her career.
As the years went by, Fuller continued to use her artwork to address racial injustices in American society such as her sculpture dedicated to Mary Turner, a young and pregnant Black woman who was lynched alongside a dozen others in May 1918. Fuller also actively participated in the women’s suffrage movement but felt alienated and left soon after once it became evident Black women were not included in the vision of her fellow suffragists. Fuller became an active member of the Harlem Renaissance Movement and in 1921, she exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for the America’s Making Exposition which was intended to highlight immigrant contributions to American art. Fuller created a series of sculptures titled Ethiopia which depict an African woman emerging from mummy wrappings like a chrysalis from a cocoon symbolizing Black femininity and identity. Over the years, various commissions kept Fuller employed but her artwork was never as respected or revered as they were in Paris.
In addition to sculpture, Fuller also made significant contributions in painting, theatre, and poetry. On the stage, she was a multi-faceted designer, director, and actress. She became heavily involved in various African-American theatre and drama groups around the Boston area and joined the Allied Arts Theatre Group where she served as head designer, director, and board member. In addition, under the pseudonym Danny Deaver, Fuller wrote about six plays. Fuller began to retire from her work in the early 1950s but she remained a very active member of her local community attending church and assisting in various plays and pageants. Many of her final pieces of art often contained religious themes and throughout the last years of her life she was often visited by other prominent African-American members of society until she passed away on March 13th, 1968.
After her death, much of her accomplishments and contributions fell into obscurity but has received renewed attention since the turn of the 21st century. Various pieces of her work can be found across the US including the Smithsonian but the Danforth Art Museum has the largest collection including a replica of her home studio and unfinished pieces. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller dedicated her life pioneering both women and Black art in a time when both aspects where heavily stigmatized by much of society. Her legacy is that of innovation, imagination, resilience, and fortitude in which her life story is certain to inspire so many others for generations to come.