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Artist
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Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
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Title
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Maud Cuney Hare (The Pianist)
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Date
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c. 1914
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Medium
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painted plaster
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Dimensions
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17" high
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Label
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In 1966, a plaster cast of the sculpture of Maud Cuney Hare was donated to Radcliffe College by the artist Meta Warrick Fuller in honor of the civil rights work of Radcliffe alumna Eleanor Whitney Morse ’22. It was presented to Radcliffe College on Meta Warrick Fuller’s 90th birthday. Mary Ingraham Bunting-Smith, President of Radcliffe College, and Mrs. Carl J. Gilbert, Chair of the Radcliffe Board of Trustees, accepted the cast on behalf of Radcliffe College. The cast was to be placed in Hilles Library when it opened in the fall of 1966. The work currently resides in the Carol K. Pforzheimer Reading Room at the Schlesinger Library.
The subject of the sculpture, Maud Cuney Hare, was born in Galveston, Texas in 1874. After graduating from high school, she moved to Boston, MA to attend the New England Conservatory of Music. As one of only two African American students, she faced discrimination from the institution and from her fellow students. When asked to leave the dormitories to live in off-campus housing, Cuney Hare, with the full support of her father, refused. This tenacity is one of the tenors that marked her professional and personal life. Indeed, Cuney Hare’s one-time fiancé W.E.B. Dubois remarked that she was one of the bravest women he knew.[1] In spite of her early challenges, Cuney Hare had a broad and successful artistic career. She was a “pianist, lecturer, composer, playwright, biographer, poetry editor, folklorist, Black music historian and collector, [and] founder and director of The Allied Arts Centre in Boston.”[2] One of Cuney Hare’s final writing projects was a history of African music titled Negro Musicians and their Music. In 1906 she married William P. Hare, and the couple resided in Boston, MA until her death 1936 at the age of 62. A small collection of Cuney Hare’s papers is held by the Archives and Special Collections of Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library.
Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller led an equally storied life. She was an African-American artist who was trained at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts in 1897 before traveling abroad in 1899 to continue her studies. In Paris, Warrick Fuller studied at the Académie Colarossi for sculpture and La Ecole des Beaux Arts for drawing. She became a pupil of famed sculptor Auguste Rodin. Warrick Fuller’s work celebrated the African heritage of African Americans. After taking a professional hiatus of almost ten years, she returned to sculpture in the 1960s. Warrick Fuller’s later work was largely devoted to creating tributes to the Civil Rights Movement. During these years, she worked in a secluded cottage studio in Framingham, MA with fellow artist Hildegarde Snow. Warrick Fuller died in 1968 at the age of 91.
[1] Jamaica Plain Historical Society. “African-American Women in Jamaica Plain History.” Retrieved on August 12, 2011 from http://www.jphs.org/people/2005/4/19/african-american-women-in-jamaica-plain-history.html
[2] Ibid
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Description
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"Fuller directed Maud Cuney Hare’s four-act poetic drama “Antar of Araby” at Boston’s Fine Arts Theatre on December 14, 1925." https://baystatebanner.com/2022/02/10/meta-warrick-fuller-noted-early-20th-century-black-sculptor-and-painter/
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Provenance
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"Meta Warrick Fuller, the colored sculptress, has the honor of having a statuette accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the subject of which is Maud Cuney Hare, the author-pianist. The statuette was exhibited at the 115th exhibition of the Academy." "Music and Art" The Crisis 19, no. 6 (April 1920): 337.
Donated by artist to Radcliffe College, 1966
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Location
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Carol K. Pforzheimer Reading Room, Schlesinger Library
