Meta Vaux Warrick

Celebrated as a sculptor whose artistic vision and understanding of the black experience was well ahead of her contemporaries, Meta Fuller was the first black American artist to draw heavily on African themes and folk tales for her subject matter. She was a native of Philadelphia and the product of black middle-class rearing. She attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts (now the Philadelphia College of Art) from 1894 to 1899 and continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1903 to 1907. By 1902, however, Fuller was already an established artist in Paris, where her work had been exhibited at Siegfried Bing’s famous gallery for modern art and design.