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

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

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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.	1
With her Jamestown tableaux, Warrick yoked the era's techniques of perceptual modernization to the representation of black history. The dioramas augmented the established tradition of black commemorative celebrations and oratory associated with holidays such as Emancipation Day and the Fourth of July. Not even the most gifted black orators could evoke the full range of historical associations that circumstances demanded and contemporary tastes eagerly sought. Warrick's dioramas complemented the urge, expressed by the African American author Sutton E. Griggs, "to move up out of the age of the voice, the age of the direct personal appeal, and live in an age where an idea can influence to action by whatever route it drifts one's way."2	2
Warrick's tableaux embodied a long-standing and conscious tactic of African American leaders and activists during the postbellum era to use aural and visual means to reach the black masses. Comparatively high rates of illiteracy and poverty among blacks impeded any campaign to impart a sense of collective history and tradition to blacks. Writing in 1874, Rev. Andrew Chambers, an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) minister from Arkansas, explained that visual displays, which would arouse the unlearned masses and stimulate interest in other forms of commemoration, were the ideal means to educate "our illiterate race." Throughout the late nineteenth century, African American efforts to erect monuments were stymied by poverty, internecine organizational squabbles, and even indifference. But interest in celebratory visual displays persisted among the ranks of black leaders and activists and inspired Warrick and her sponsors at the Jamestown exposition.3	3
Yet Warrick's dioramas were much more than just a pragmatic means to instruct the black masses. Warrick and her sponsors adopted the dioramic form in a clear effort to adapt, extend, and experiment with the representational innovations of the era. The very form of her creation, as much as its depiction of the progressive and upward evolution of African Americans, was intended to provide evidence of the modernity of African Americans to whites and blacks alike. As a studio-trained artist, she was familiar with the contemporary transformation of visual culture, especially the proliferation of forms of verisimilitude ranging from dioramas to film. She recognized both the challenge and the importance of capturing her audience's attention at a time of dizzying visual experimentation and in a venue rife with competing attractions.	. . .