Born Meta Vaux Warrick in Philadelphia June 9, 1877. Her mother was a beautician and her father was a barber who owned several shops throughout the city. Their financial stability allowed them to provide their children with a formal education and nurture their artistic gifts. Meta was a “divinely called” young artist, earning a scholarship to Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts and mentored by renowned painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, who was a family friend. As a young woman, she traveled to Paris to continue her training, working with the likes of famed sculptor Auguste Rodin and creating for the 1900 World’s Fair.
Following her return to the United States, Meta Warrick married Solomon Fuller, a renowned Black physician and psychiatrist, whose family had repatriated to Liberia. Solomon resettled in the United States to pursue a career in medicine. The two raised three children in Framington, Massachusetts.
Meta’s art grew and evolved with the collective experiences of Black people. She maintained a close relationship with Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who encouraged her to use art to advance the cause of justice.
Her sculpture in honor of Mary Turner, a Black woman heinously lynched, set aflame, baby cut out of her eight-month pregnant belly and stomped to death by a white mob, earned Fuller the moniker “sculptor of horrors.” In reality she was a truth-teller, whose work illustrated the vicious brutality of racism, as well as the counter of Black resistance. Perhaps her most famous work, Ethiopia Awakening is the rising of a Black woman, chest pulled by the heavens as she frees herself from “ties that bind.”
Meta Warrick Fuller is a testament to the power of Black art as a liberatory tool…speaking directly to the souls of Black folk.
Offered by Melina Abdullah @docmellymel
