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Meta V.W. Fuller, Sculptor born

Meta Fuller

*This date marks the birth of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller in 1877. She was a Black sculptor and one of the earliest studio artists to depict black themes.

Meta Vaux Warrick was born in Philadelphia and grew up in an upper-middle-class home, receiving art, music, dance, and horseback riding lessons.  After one of her high school projects was selected to be part of the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition, her career as an artist began. She received a three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and a one-year postgraduate fellowship. In September 1899, she studied in Paris and received private guidance from prominent sculptor Auguste Rodin, an especially significant early supporter.

Vaux Warrick's works often portrayed dramatic and grotesque figures and were praised for their force and power. When she decided to return to the United States in October 1902, she found the art world in her hometown unwilling to accept her.  In 1907 she became the first Black woman artist to receive a federal commission for her art.  In 1910, a fire in a Philadelphia warehouse destroyed 16 years' worth of work, including everything she had created in Paris.

During this time, she married Dr. Solomon Fuller.  Over the next few decades, she became known for pieces that celebrated African and African American history, struggle, and heritage.  Other Black writers, musicians, and artists that began in New York in the 1920s sometimes remember Fuller as a Harlem Renaissance artist because her work from this period coincided with the flowering of art.

In 1950 Fuller temporarily retired from sculpting to care for her ill husband and to recover from her tuberculosis. But by the late 1950s, she had returned, creating a bust of educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown and other notable Black women. In the 1960s, Fuller sculpted works that reflected her support of the American Civil Rights Movement. Vaux Warrick Fuller reflected the spirit of a woman who created bold, dramatic work that took new chances in African American art.

By the time she passed away in 1968 at the age of 90, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller had spent more than 70 years creating art and had become one of the most innovative Black artists of the twentieth century.

To be an Artist