SCRAPBOOK
Excerpt from "Asserting Agency: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Scrapbook"
"Wrapped in frayed and torn brown burlap, the scrapbook of the pioneering African American sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) outlived a disastrous warehouse fire in Philadelphia in 1910 which destroyed all her sculpture, representing sixteen years of work, from her time as a student in the Industrial School of Arts (now the University of the Arts) in Philadelphia to pieces from her three-year stay in Paris. The loss included sculptures shown at prestigious exhibitions made while she was in dialogue with Auguste Rodin who admired her work. Although Fuller would persevere and later create many major works whose cultural themes shaped the direction of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Emancipation (1913, Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Museum of African American History/MAAH), Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919, MAAH), Ethiopia Awakening (1921, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), and Talking Skull, (1937, MAAH), and mentor several female artists, including Augusta Savage and Loïs Mailou Jones, few records survive which document her early works or her accomplishments abroad. However, a recent re-discovery of the personal scrapbook from the early years of this important sculptor enables an opportunity to reconstruct some of what had been lost and demonstrate the enduring impact of her period in France on her career and on the career trajectories of other Black visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of profound cultural creativity centered in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. The scrapbook expands Fuller’s voice in the archival record and reveals her active interventions in transnational art practice and in crafting the critical reception of her work."
