Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
Image in the public domain

At the Berthe Weill exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie last year, a sculpture entitled Les Malheurs was displayed.

The Wretched
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
1901 Bronze
© Entrée to Black Paris

The information card for the work indicated that Weill showed the sculpture at her gallery in 1901 and presented the following quote:

"Miss Warwick exhibited some promising sculptures .... Whatever became of her?"

The "Miss Warwick" that Weill referred to was Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller.

On May 4-5, 2026, Columbia Global Paris Center presented a symposium that explored Fuller's life and art.  Scholars, curators, archivists, and members of her family gathered at Reid Hall to examine "her Paris years, her major works, her place among her contemporaries, and the ongoing efforts to preserve and steward her legacy." 

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
1919
Image in the public domain

A native Philadelphian, Fuller was the second known African-American woman to go to Paris to study art (the first was Annie E. Anderson Walker).  She arrived in Paris in late October 1899 and encountered U.S.-inspired racism on her first day in the city when she was denied lodging at the American Girls' Club—which was located at Reid Hall—because she was Black.

During her three years in Paris, she studied at the avant-garde Académie Colorossi and the ultra-traditional Ecoles des Beaux-Arts.

She became friends with Henry Ossawa Tanner and his wife, met American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois, and was mentored by none other than Auguste Rodin. 

In addition to having her work exhibited at Berthe Weill's gallery in 1901, her sculptures (including The Wretched) were displayed in a solo exhibition at Siegfried Bing's Maison de l'Art Nouveau in 1902 and at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts Salon (after her departure from France) in 1903.

In a twist of fate, her bust John the Baptist was displayed at Reid Hall in 1902 during the annual exhibition of the American Women's Art Association (where Tanner served as a judge).

If Fuller was the second African-American woman to study art in Paris, she was the first African-American female sculptor to do so.  She was a torchbearer for Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, both of whom studied in Paris in the 1920s-1930s.

Reid Hall has published an extensive article about Fuller as part of its Digital History project.

Read a description of Fuller's life and art written by a contemporary, Benjamin Griffith Brawley, HERE.