Race, Gender, and Nation: Rethinking the Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller

At the height of her career in the 1920s, Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) created the sculpture, Ethiopia Awakening. Art historical scholarship has focused on the way this work anticipated the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance in its symbolic representation of a new radicalized African American identity. Ethiopia Awakening has become the single most important object in Fuller's oeuvre. To a large extent, the rest of her sculpture has been ignored because it does not fit neatly into this black nationalist narrative constructed around this one work of art. In addition, Fuller has been defined frequently as both a "race artist" and a "genius" anointed by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Her art, however, is not singularly about genius and race, nor is it simply a marker in the narrative of the ascendancy of black culture. Neither is it a mere illustration of historical events. Her work is about history and race, religion and gender, art and nation. This dissertation focuses on the art Fuller created between her return from Paris in 1902 and her modeling of Ethiopia Awakening in 1921. Central to my evaluation of her sculpture is an inquiry into its interaction with the social and political movements of the early 1900s. By analyzing the cultural and historical events that shaped Fuller's work, this dissertation expands the scope of research on Fuller and provides a nuanced exploration and more complex understanding of the content of her work as it relates to its form. I have chosen to discuss five works by Fuller based on two criteria: first, they survived to the present and are in either museum or private collections; and second, they illustrate and elucidate the intertwining relationship of race, gender, and nation in the early twentieth century. I resituate Fuller in the complicated historical past that she occupied, shaped by her identities as an African American, as a woman, as an artist, as a wife and mother, as a Victorian, and as a member of an elite W. E. B. Du Bois called the "Talented Tenth".