When she died at the age of 91 in 1968, Meta Warrick Fuller left behind a long and productive life as a sculptor, but she also bequeathed a formidable challenge to art historians. In 1910, a warehouse fire destroyed her early sculptures, including the student work she made while at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts and the sculptures from her three years (1899–1902) studying in Paris. The formative works stored in that warehouse are known today only through black-and-white photographs. Further complicating the scholar’s task is the fact that Fuller’s most public sculptures were made for fairs and expositions and therefore not intended as permanent works. For example, a series of one-third-life-size plaster figures Fuller made for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition were destroyed shortly after the conclusion of the fair, and their appearance must be reconstructed from grainy black-and-white photographs and descriptions published in newspapers and the fair’s guidebook. Compounding these obstacles, even outweighing them, is the sculptor’s own reserve, as the picture of Fuller that emerges in Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History is of an artist who was usually circumspect about her works, motivations, and ideas about art.

Ater surmounts these many challenges to reconstructing the early third of Fuller’s career by making use of alternatives to the artist’s statements and extant works. Her study relies heavily upon photographs, the visual and artistic sources available to Fuller, published critical responses, and the writings of Fuller’s African American contemporaries and associates. The book is composed of four chapters, with an introduction and a brief epilogue that deals with the critical reception of Fuller’s work during the Harlem Renaissance and after. It is in chapter 1, which provides a biographical sketch of the artist and her career, that Fuller seems most tangibly present—in all the contours of her ambition, intelligence, and disappointments. Ater provides a concise yet nuanced account of Fuller’s training as a sculptor, the options available to her as a woman—and an African American woman at that—at the turn of the century, and how Fuller reconciled her aspirations to make grand romantic nudes au Rodin with the imperatives and restrictions placed upon her as a “colored woman sculptor.” This first chapter does an excellent job of situating Fuller in the context of other sculptors of her time, especially women sculptors, so that the reader gets a sense of how Fuller’s professional decisions were shaped by both the opportunities and limitations presented by her sex, race, and class. Ater draws together these various forces which acted on Fuller’s career in a tour-de-force analysis of two photographs of the artist, one in her parlor and another in her makeshift studio in the attic of the home she shared with her physician husband and three children. The contrast of these two photographs fulfills Ater’s objective to produce a “complicated” and “episodic” account of Fuller, one that can encompass the many facets of the artist’s life as well as the constantly shifting grounds of African American cultural politics.

Each of the remaining three chapters addresses a single sculptural commission that Fuller made for an exposition or fair. Chapter 2 deals with the Warrick Tableaux, the plaster diorama figures for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. Chapter 3 discusses the allegorical sculpture group entitled Emancipation for the National Emancipation Exposition in 1913, and chapter 4 considers Ethiopia, a work created for the 1921 America’s Making Exposition in New York. The selection of these three works, some of them no longer extant and all of them made for exhibitions that were by definition ephemeral, seems highly unorthodox. However, Ater explains why these works, and not other Fuller sculptures like Mary Turner (1919) or Talking Skull (1937), serve as the core of her study. Though only Emancipation (1913) was ever realized as a public monument (posthumously in 1999), Fuller envisioned all three of these works as serving commemorative functions and speaking to a public audience, both black and white. Furthermore, Ater makes a case for the centrality of these works in understanding how world’s fairs and expositions provided a critical ground for African Americans to intervene in black representation as well as the representation of American history.

The body is a key term for Ater’s analysis because, she argues, the black body operated as a site of contestation in post-Reconstruction America, where competing representations from minstrelsy to W. E. B. Du Bois’s exhibition on the “typical negro physique” used the black body to make diverse claims about integration and racial equality. Fuller effectively mobilized the black nude in her 1907 plaster diorama figures which used the nudity of the African figures as a foil to the fully clothed, educated, and church-going figures in later dioramas. But when she used semi-nudity again in her 1913 Emancipation group, her work was greeted with a tepid reception by some of her initial supporters, such as Du Bois, who Fuller reported, “seemed all enthusiasm until the thing arrived at the hall and from that time on he seemed to ignore [her]” (76). By the time she sculpted Ethiopia for the 1921 fair, Fuller, according to Ater, understood the volatility of the nude black body and conscientiously suppressed it in this work. Ethiopia, in the guise of an Egyptian mummy, is almost completely encased in bandages and drapery, emphasizing the face, whose features Ater argues “are clearly modeled on black physiognomy,” possibly Fuller’s own face (106). Though Ater’s proposal that the face of Ethiopia may have been modeled on the artist’s features seems plausible—there is a general likeness in the shape of the face, nose, and lips—her conclusion that these features are unambiguously black or typical of the race struck me as a tendentious claim, requiring further elaboration. The photographs of Fuller reproduced in Ater’s book show a woman with a prominent nose, slightly fleshy at the tip, full but not exceptionally full lips, and light skin. None of these features, either individually or collectively, suggests blackness to this reader. Even if Ater’s argument that there is such a thing as a phenotypical black body is valid, what does it say for Fuller’s work and its implications that they relied upon an essentialized racial vision of blackness? As early as 1900, according to Shawn Michelle Smith, Du Bois (someone cited repeatedly in Ater’s analysis) produced the Types of American Negroes to explode precisely this very notion of a monolithic, stereotyped black body. What kinds of political gains could be won by supplanting Du Bois’s representation of the diversity of black Americans with an essentialized notion of race? These are some of the questions raised by Ater’s analysis of the representation of the black body in Fuller’s sculptures.

Visibility is another key term that comes up repeatedly in the book. Ater uses visibility to signal her investment in calling attention to an artist who was previously “marginalized, invisible, and isolated from serious scholarship” (2), at the same time that the term also speaks more broadly for African American claims for recognition in the Progressive Era. Yet the particular conditions and strategies of African American visibility as they were practiced by Fuller and black leaders like Du Bois posed a paradox. Many African Americans recognized that the insertion of a black agenda in Progressive Era reform movements would happen only on condition that black Americans could demonstrate that they conformed to white middle-class decorum. “African American men and women,” Ater states, “saw in ‘genteel performance’ a means to advance the progress of the race” (12). But this advancement came at the cost of diluting the heterogeneity and distinctive characteristics of black social identities at the same time that it risked the adoption of some of the same racist ideas about “progress” and “civilization” that made black Africans evolutionary laggards and American slavery the white man’s gift of “the civilizing influence of labor.” At various moments in the book, Ater acknowledges the problems associated with the accommodationist approach of Fuller’s works for the fair’s black exhibits but also reminds her readers of the contemporary context for these accommodations: Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling supporting segregation. Ater’s attempt to contextualize the rhetorical role of Fuller’s sculptures at the fairs recalls, for this reader, an analogous strain between political allies Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells in 1893. Wells, ever the radical, vehemently objected to the marginalization and denigration of blacks at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and urged African Americans to boycott the fair. Douglass, who was in charge of the Haitian Pavilion at the fair, gently chided Wells, saying, “all we have received has come to us in small concessions, and it is not the part of wisdom to despise the day of small things” (quoted in Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions, Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, New York: Amistad, 2008, 269). Ater’s evaluation of Fuller’s sculptures at the fairs, in all their fraught complexities, also admonishes readers to appreciate the “small concessions” and the slow, incremental course of advancement.

Remaking Race and History is an important sourcebook on this otherwise under-recognized artist and her early career, and, unlike previous studies on race in American sculpture such as Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldier, Kneeling Slave: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) (click here for review), it presents the artist and sculpture as responsive to a black as much as a white audience. Because Fuller’s works for the fairs were commissioned by African American exhibitors, her sculptures can illuminate the conditions of black patronage of African American artists—an area still largely unmapped in the discipline. Ater’s account makes clear that African American reformers and leaders were motivated consumers of art and the kind of cultural work it could do for them, but what remains to be taken up, perhaps by other scholars in future or ongoing work, is a thorough analysis of the ways in which the influence of black patrons was translated into artistic projects but also resisted by the artists who understood their works as operating outside of these frames. Remaking Race and History provides an indication of the insights that such future investigations can yield, expanding the discipline’s understanding of the audience for American sculpture, as well as alternative systems for its patronage.