Meta Warrick's 1907 "Negro Tableaux" and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory

Abstract

For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our “Teaching the JAH” Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/∼jah/teaching>. For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our “Teaching the JAH” Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/∼jah/teaching>. Confronting visitors who meandered through the Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Norfolk, Virginia, was a tableau entitled Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown. Meta Warrick (Fuller), a sculptor, had created and arranged twenty-four two-foot-high plaster figures that re-imagined the shackled, nearly nude, and traumatized Africans who had landed in Jamestown in 1619. In Landing and thirteen other dioramas, she used more than 130 painted plaster figures, model landscapes, and backgrounds to give viewers a chronological survey of the African American experience. Scenes ranged from a tableau of a fugitive slave to a depiction of the home life of “the modern, successfully educated, and progressive Negro.”1 Drawing upon but moving beyond her classical training in Philadelphia and Paris, Warrick applied new capacities for simulation and illusion to the depiction of African American themes. By doing so, she expanded the repertoire of representation of the African American past. Incorporating the lives and concerns of African Americans into the saga of civilization, she turned the historical African American into the centerpiece of the saga, claiming a position the dominant white narrative denied. Her dioramas, which suggested the expansiveness of black abilities, aspirations, and experiences, presented a cogent alternative to white representations of history—by an African American.