By Maya Kirkpatrick
The Black Female image stands as the most politically charged and symbolically powerful subject in American Art. She has once been used as a tool to degrade and control African American women and their bodies, and now represents resilience and empowerment to a community. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller is the first African American Female sculptor to combine feminisms and racial themes in her work. She utilizes the growing New Negro movement and the Pan-African aesthetic in her application of the reinvention of the Black Female image. She represents the Harlem Renaissance with her work by portraying the African diaspora as the dignified, modern, and powerful woman she always was. Fuller’s work was a pivotal point in reinventing the Black Female image away from the problematic stereotypes, mainly the reclamation of the nude female body and the diversity of the ethnographic ideal.
