Analysis Of Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethiopia Awakening

Gaddie-1

Meta Warrick Fuller’s sculpture “Ethiopia Awakening” served as a metaphoric yearning for African culture, a symbolic image of emancipation, an awakening of African Americans diaspora identity, resurgence of Fuller’s artistic career and as a self-portrait of Fuller. The Progressive era, from 1890 to 1920, forms the backdrop to Fuller’s life and art. This period has come to symbolize the reform efforts of the middle class. White middle class progressives sought to reengineer industry and government, pushed for economic and social reforms. The Progressive era was also a time of intense contradictions and ambiguities. Race was the blind spot of white progressives. 1 At the turn of the twentieth-century African Americans continued to be caricatured and stereotyped as buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers, threatening sub-humans which led to African Americans being objectified.2 When white Americans confronted African Americans in any meaningful way, they did so through the filter of a web of racist images that they placed over the black face of humanity like a mask over an actor. African American intellectuals understood that one of their central tasks to counter the negative representation of African Americans in art would be through the reimage of the physiognomy of African Americans. The task was an enormous one, especially since African Americans had only the most minimal control over the mass production and dissemination of information. In addition, the manufacture of products that displayed stereotypical and derogatory images of African Americans was particularly lucrative.3
In 1921, the New York State and New York City Departments of Education sponsored the America’s Making Exposition. The objective of...

... middle of paper ...

...culpture is the artist’s life story: bound, figuratively and literally, at her feet, Fuller progressively unravels her own shroud, and awakens to her full potential as an artist.33
In conclusion, scholars have come to identity “Ethiopia Awakening” as one of Fuller’s most meaningful works. 34 The sculpture demonstrated multiple and diverse meanings. “Ethiopia Awakening” embodied symbolic language that pointed to the struggles of contemporary African Americans. Fuller’s use of symbolic language demonstrated that like music and religion, art has the power to express emotion. Today, “Ethiopia Awakening” stands in the reading room of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. The sculpture reminds researchers to recover, document, write and share African American history.