Renée Ater has taken on the worthy project of writing a well-researched scholarly book on the talented turn-of-the-century sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller. Fuller, born in 1877, and hence twenty years younger than the black American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner and fifteen years older than the sculptor Augusta Savage, is of the generation that came of age in the early twentieth century – at the moment when W. E. B. Du Bois was looking for artists who could represent themes of “Negro uplift.”

Ater's book has four chapters, the first of which is a biographical account of Fuller's middle-class Philadelphia background; her art-school training at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts (PMSIA); her three-year sojourn in France, where she met Tanner, was advised by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and was given a tour of Rodin's studio by the master himself. She studied at the popular Académe Colarossi and developed a relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois at the time of the 1900 Paris Exposition. They all praised her and urged her on, and she showed her work in Paris galleries. But when she returned to Philadelphia in 1902, she met with no encouragement at all and the galleries rejected her work. She returned for more classes at the PMSIA, but that did not alter the critical reception of her work.

Courted by a young African American pathologist from Boston, she married him in 1909 and moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, where he had set up practice. A blow to her ambitions came when a fire in a Philadelphia warehouse destroyed the artwork she had left behind in Philadelphia. Like many other middle-class American women artists at the end of the century, domesticity moved into her life. She soon had two sons and took on the added responsibility of raising her deceased sister's preteen daughter. With the chores of housekeeping, mothering, and maintaining a proper home to satisfy the professional and social needs of her doctor husband, there was no time left for making art – nor was there space. Eventually, with funds from a small inheritance, she built a studio for herself, but could never devote herself single-mindedly to her art. In later years, she nursed her husband who was in failing health until she gave up art altogether. Nevertheless, she managed to involve herself in progressive causes in Framingham and to produce a lasting legacy based on the few works that survive.

Ater has organized the remaining three chapters around commissions Fuller did for three major expositions: the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1907; the National Emancipation Exposition held at the Twelfth Regiment Armory at Sixty-Second Street, New York City, in 1913; and America's Making Exposition held at the Seventh-First Regiment Armory at Thirty-Fourth Street, New York City, in 1921. In each of these chapters she emphasizes the social context in which decisions were made, the agendas of the exposition officials, and the responses by the public and press.

The Jamestown commission consisted of doll-sized painted plasters, dressed in clothes of fabric along with models for buildings and furnishings, for fourteen dioramas, each diorama being ten by ten feet, which were installed in the Negro Building. The subjects, primarily dictated by the Virginia commissioners, who had racist ideas of the “evolution” of African Americans in Virginia and the United States, ranged from “Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown,” through slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction, to “Commencement Day,” with the dolls assembled on the grounds of a college where young people are receiving their diplomas. One of the dioramas is Defending Master's Home in Civil War, a subject that would endear the Virginia commissioners, but which we today see as an accommodation to the mythology of the Old South. Needless to say, African American intellectuals found much to dislike about the Jamestown exposition, although they generally admired Fuller's efforts. Ater concludes, “Fuller's dioramas showed African Americans actively engaged in transforming and improving their lives, lifting themselves from the margins of society through hard work, education, and community, and moving toward middle-class respectability” (39). Ater observes that the figures’ faces become increasingly “white,” as they move toward this respectability in the later dioramas. Fuller, to Ater, was “aligning herself with an older and more conservative viewpoint” (54) that maintained that race mixing would improve the race. (Some abolitionists believed that racial mixing would improve all the races; Thomas Jefferson, most famously in his Notes on the State of Virginia, advanced the notion that race mixing would lead to degeneration of the races.) These debates are, of course, grounded on racist assumptions that need airing; the discourse on skin color, notions of beauty, and status seems to be one of the last taboos that scholars need to confront, perhaps because people like W. E. B. Du Bois would be implicated.

After a break from her professional work for six years because of family duties, Fuller accepted the commission to create an over-life-size sculpture for the National Emancipation Exposition, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Called Emancipation, it is arguably her most significant work. As Ater notes, “Fuller combined an attention to realism in the details of the figures’ physiognomies and bodies with an allegorical treatment of the sculpture's themes” (73). Like the Jamestown Exposition, it was meant to celebrate “the story of black progress and racial uplift since slavery” (75). Ater argues persuasively that the ideology of progress inevitably meant advancing and consolidating the (racist) status quo.

The last chapter focusses on the America's Making Exposition, a celebration of the diversity of ethnic groups in the United States, staged at a time of strong anti-immigrant attitudes, police raids, and legislation. African Americans were invited to participate as “honorary immigrants,” a phrase that rankled most intellectuals. The exposition was designed to promote “a Progressive message of nationalism, unity, patriotism, and social order” (101). To this celebration, Fuller contributed the sculpture Ethiopia, which depicts a standing female with an Egyptian headdress in the process of unwinding the bands of cloth that had immobilized her movement. The sculpture functioned as a highpoint of the Negro exhibit installed in the Armory, and it also participated in the pageants that accompanied the Exposition. Ater's discussion of the pageants, elaborately choreographed with hundreds of participants, underscores the importance of the performative in African American culture. Unfortunately, before the days of extensive documentary photography, the scholar has to rely on words to describe the visual culture of pageants. Ater concludes the chapter with a convincing argument that Ethiopia can be interpreted as a self-portrait of Fuller, in both its features and its sentiment – the desire to unwind the bonds of prejudice and social convention in order to establish a new day of freedom.

Even with Ater's focussed discussions on the three expositions, in the biographical first chapter she manages to discuss the other notable sculptures by Fuller, such as Silent Sorrow, c.1900; The Wretched, c.1902; Mary Turner: A Silent Protest against Mob Violence, 1919; and Talking Skull, 1937. The Mary Turner sculpture refers to the victim of a 1918 horrific lynching in Georgia; when Turner had protested her husband's lynching, a mob of white men turned on her and murdered her even though she was pregnant. Ater's epilogue reports on the casting of Fuller's Emancipation and its placement in Boston's Harriet Tubman Square along with a sculptural relief, Step on Board, of Harriet Tubman leading a group of fugitives to freedom, by the contemporary sculptor Fern Cunningham.

The correspondence exchanged by Fuller and the art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray reveals Fuller's ambitions and self-doubts, and I would have liked more excerpts. Murray privately printed his book Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation, and it should be required reading for today's scholars. His papers, now housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, promise further insights into the experiences of artists facing not only the usual trials of being creative in an indifferent world but also the added burden of racist ideologies and daily humiliations. I would also have been interested in knowing what Professor Ater learned from her study of Fuller's work (the contents of her studio) now housed at the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. Perhaps that is the subject of a different book. That Meta Warwick Fuller achieved as much as she did is a testament to her creativity, tenacity, and will to spread the message about the resilience of African Americans in America; Renée Ater has told the story well.

Even as it is a necessary and welcome study, there is something strangely still about Renée Ater's book Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Ater structures her discussion in an elegant and streamlined format of Introduction, a biographical chapter, three chapters that examine Fuller's participation in three fairs, and an Epilogue. In the Introduction, Ater communicates her interest in Fuller and the questions that Fuller's career continued to raise for Ater: “My interest in Fuller began with her life-size sculpture Ethiopia. I wanted to understand why so much scholarly attention had been focused on a single object, while the rest of her sculpture was overlooked, or at best reduced to a footnote in the historical record” (1). Ater's answer to this narrow focus on one object by Fuller is to balance “Fuller's biography as an artist with a social history of her art” in the context of Progressive Era politics and the overarching ideology of the day, the so-called “Negro problem.” Ater astutely identifies African American engagement with the “Negro problem,” noting,

Coming as it does at the outset of her study, Ater's rather benign description of what has been variously posed as a “problem” or “question” sets up the static formula for what follows in the interpretation of Fuller's artistic intent and the subsequent reception of Fuller's work, as a series of solutions and answers to the “Negro problem/question.”

No one was more engaged by the “Negro question” than Booker T. Washington, and Washington plays a prominent role in Ater's narrative (58, 66–68, 67, 70, 88, 90–91, 94, 100, 128). Missing from Ater's study, however, is the 2006 publication by Michael Rudolph West titled The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations. West's book is an intellectual biography of Washington and his first chapter is devoted entirely to a history of the ideology of what had been called “The Great and Intricate Problem.” It is useful to compare West's formulation of the “Negro problem” with Ater's. West contends,

And so it is a question without an answer and a problem without a solution, a palliative that ameliorated the prevailing contradiction that continues to haunt the United States, currently in the conflict over marriage equality and Mexican immigrants. How would West's richer, more complex understanding of the purpose and function of the “Negro problem” have shaped Ater's study of Fuller's career and artistic production? That is the first question I would ask the reader to hold in their minds as they progress through Ater's book.

Chapter 1 opens with two little-known photographs of Fuller. According to Ater, they exemplify the complications and contradictions of Fuller as both professional artist and Victorian wife and mother: “As a ‘pattern of possibilities,’ this biographical narrative considers Meta Warrick Fuller as a woman with an intricate story, striving to fulfill herself as an artist and as a wife and mother” (35). A bit later in the chapter, Fuller provides two additional photographs that purport to serve the same function – Fuller in her parlor and Fuller in her studio. Nevertheless, Ater's obviation of a sustained analysis of gender (tellingly absented in the title of her study) has both overburdened and overdetermined the evidentiary potential of photography. Moreover, what had been, in Ater's analysis, attempts by Fuller to construct her own identity in her studio garb now simply illustrate her as an artist in conflict with her identity as wife and mother. The photos are treated as transparencies and their use epitomizes stasis – a stable state characterized by the cancellation of all forces by equal opposing forces. The qualities of stasis and stillness are exacerbated by the overabundance of unattributed quotations throughout the text. One must constantly flip to the endnotes in order to understand who said what and when. I found myself asking, who were Fuller's friends; who were her supporters, her detractors? There are no biographies of them and they remain largely unnamed in the body of the text. Who was Elizabeth Dunbar? And if, as Ater stipulates, Fuller lived largely within and in conflict with Victorianism, how would Ater explain Fuller's long and intimate friendship with Freeman Henry Morris Murray? The quality of stillness that permeates this study manifests in all significations of the concept – hushed, motionless, airless, and in spite of a preceding event or consideration. A notable example is the disconnect between the biographical chapter and the following chapters. In her biographical chapter, Ater tells the story of Fuller's first day in Paris in 1899. Alone and abroad for the first time, Fuller was turned away from the American Art Students’ Club for Women, which offered American women artists a safe haven and a “supportive setting that validated their achievements and ambitions” (15). However, Fuller's gender was inflected by her race and she was banished from the institution because the director worried that her presence would offend the southern white women who were boarding at the club (15–16). Interestingly, Fuller exacts her revenge when, in 1907, she creates a series (now lost) of dioramas known through photographs as the Warrick Tableaux. The fourth diorama is titled Defending Master's Home in Civil War and was meant to demonstrate the innate quality of loyalty intrinsic to “the” African American character. As the loyal slaves drive off treacherous, poor whites, the mistress of the plantation swoons into the arms of her mammy. Ater makes no connection between Fuller's experience in Paris and this representation of white womanhood as delicate, ineffective, and affected. This representation, as well as the representation of loyal slaves, connects Fuller to nineteenth-century ideologies made plain by authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe even as they connect Fuller to a searing critique of white femininity. Given what I have outlined above – from Fuller's friendships to her hardships – how would a sustained analysis of gender have nuanced Ater's study? This is the second question that I would ask the reader to hold in mind.

The strength of Ater's text resides in her thoughtful and penetrating analyses of Fuller's sculptures and in Ater bringing to light little-known works by the artist. Her next chapters place Fuller's work in the context of three world's fairs: The Tercentennial Exposition at Jamestown, Virginia (1907); the National Emancipation Exposition in New York City (1913); and the America's Making Exposition in New York City (1921). The Tercentennial Exposition at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1907, was perhaps the apotheosis of the collaboration between Fuller as an artist and the didactic, propagandistic uses that African American leaders would have art serve. Her series of dioramas followed four themes: the positive effects of improved environment, an emphasis on the clothed body, the ideology of racial uplift, and the interpretation of black history as an “ethical awakening” (37). The twelve scenes also crossed various geographical boundaries, from Jamestown, to the more generic “South,” to Philadelphia; from rural to urban spaces; from outdoors to domestic interiors. Ater notes,

Beyond the white–black dynamic and the general ambiguity in Fuller's work, the complexity involved in her choices could have been further explored and extended through a consistent deployment of critical race theory as an aspect of geographical positioning. What influenced Fuller's choices as a northern artist, who was African American, and her depiction of southern blacks? Ater frequently mentions the stereotyped images to which African Americans were largely held, but she does not illustrate them, nor does she connect them to the type of “southern darkey” so maligned in representations by both whites and blacks, from popular culture to etiquette manuals.

In the same year and in the same town as the Armory Show (although this fact remains unregarded by Ater, as well as by those scholars who study the Armory Show), Meta Warrick Fuller participated in the National Emancipation Exposition of 1913. Ater reveals, “The fair's planners [among whom were W. E. B. Du Bois (30)] asked Fuller to create a work that would commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation” (73). Ater provides crucial evidence to support the differences between how whites and blacks remembered the war and emancipation, as well as the lack of uniformity in how African Americans viewed the war and emancipation. Ater's discussion of Fuller's sculpture, Emancipation, is excellent and revelatory. The contextualization of the sculpture, however, could have been more satisfactory – how, for example, does the work compare to the sculptures of Charles Cordier or Malvina Hoffman? Ater provides a fascinating quotation from Fuller, who notes in hindsight, “Since I had no model for the figure I must have associated him with the peculiarities of the Negro youth.” Ater continues, “She [Fuller] connected the male with a photo of a Senegalese she had seen and she argued that certain physical and racial types existed” (78). Furthermore, what does Fuller's choice, to model the male youth on the figure of an African (and one from a specific region of Africa) tell us about the changing perception of Africa among certain African Americans? How does this depiction compare to Fuller's earlier dioramas and the dichotomy of slave/African/unclothed to the supposed advancement of the race as specified by education, acculturation, and clothing? Ater does draw important connections between Fuller's sculpture and past depictions of emancipation, as well as to contemporary arguments between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington relative to the “Negro problem.” Ater also reveals Du Bois's displeasure with Emancipation, citing the semi-nudity of the black figures as one possible reason. “Du Bois wanted symbolic form, not black likeness. He sought a metaphor that conveyed the anguish and pain of ‘the souls of black folk’ in the post-emancipation era” (76).

In 1921, Fuller created her most renowned sculpture for the America's Making Exposition. The exposition focussed on the contributions of immigrants to American society and “promoted a Progressive message of nationalism, unity, patriotism, and social order” (101). With African Americans present as “honorary immigrants,” the fair was staged once again in New York City. Ater shines in her discussion of Fuller's Ethiopia. Her contextualizations are rich and evocative, when, for example, Ater discusses the statue in the context of African American pageantry (129–31). Ater also connects Fuller's sculpture to the tendency of black intellectuals to locate blackness within the public discourse on Ethiopia and Egypt, reclaiming those spaces from nineteenth-century anthropologists who argued that the rulers of ancient Egypt were “Aryan” and that the slaves were black African. As Ater notes,

I end with the third and final question for the reader to bear in mind as they contemplate the richness of Ater's text: what really constitutes the “success” of such images? From the dioramas to Emancipation to Ethiopia, such objects did not solve or answer the “Negro problem/question,” nor did such objects perceptibly slow, impede, or stop negative portrayals of African Americans. Thanks to Ater, we know how black planners responded to these fairs; we also know that participation by African Americans was segregated and ancillary to the main events of such fairs. What we don't know is who saw Fuller's contributions, nor do we know who the general public was or how they received the objects. And yet “success” appears to be Ater's prevailing argument about the reception of Fuller's pieces. With regard to the dioramas, Ater writes,

Ater offers similar bromides relative to Fuller's other sculptures as well. About her sculpture Emancipation, Ater argues that with the female figure, Fuller “sought to overcome a visual tradition of the black woman as both asexual (the mammy) and licentious (the jezebel)” (80). About Ethiopia, Ater contends that connecting African American history to Ethiopia and Egypt was a “quest to assert African Americans’ significance in the larger context of world history”; Fuller “engaged in the construction of a new and powerful image of blackness” and of African American participation in general, the purpose being to “educate the larger public about the political, educational, and cultural advancement of African Americans” (115 and 123). What, then, does “refutation” do, counter, or construct? Is the positive stereotype really the answer to the “problem” of the negative stereotype? I know that this last question about success is an impossible one to answer, but all too often we, as scholars, rest easy on the idea of refutation as counterpoise (a synonym for “stasis”). This search for success seems to me to be a profound oversimplification of how objects function. Much more interesting, for example, would be an examination of the fissure that developed between Du Bois and Fuller in Fuller's depiction of emancipation. It just may be the creative space in which Fuller sought not only to overcome a visual tradition, but also to assert herself as an artist with her own voice and her own vision.

As the early twentieth century's foremost black woman sculptor, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) occupies a vital place in US art history. Her strikingly beautiful bronze and plaster figures afforded black subjects a level of dignity and emotive force rarely before seen in art. Fuller's life encompassed the end of Reconstruction and the end of the civil rights era and her work rendered movingly visible African Americans’ fight for civil and political rights. Sculptures such as Emancipation (1913) and Mary Turner: A Silent Protest against Mob Violence (1919) were evocative assertions of black peoples’ humanity at a time when lynchings and race riots were at their height. The responses that such works provoked and the struggles that Warrick endured to create and exhibit them shed important light on the racially and sexually occlusive social frameworks that Progressive Era black women artists were forced to negotiate. Yet Fuller is rarely included in traditional art histories. Consequently, her aesthetic interventions in contemporary attitudes to race, gender, class and nationhood have been almost entirely forgotten.

Remaking Race and History is a beautifully illustrated corrective to this neglect that both pays tribute to Fuller's art and uses it as a framework for elucidating some of the racist occlusions of early twentieth-century US cultural narratives. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, including photographs of lost artworks, author Renée Ater maps prevailing ideologies of race, gender and nationhood that Fuller was forced to confront as a Progressive Era black US woman artist. As Ater persuasively argues, the enduring elision of the sculptor from mainstream art histories belies the “interdependence of art making, race, gender, history, and public culture in the United States during the Progressive era” (2, emphasis added). Racism held in check the fame that Fuller's creative and technical skills ought to have brought her. The demands of marriage and motherhood, and the loss of her early work in a warehouse fire, compounded her career frustrations. At the end of her life, Fuller concluded that her labours had been futile and that her art would be forgotten. Yet, at the height of her career, Fuller enjoyed significant attention among the African American establishment, which celebrated her as the “‘race artist’ of her generation” (35). Race leaders commissioned Fuller to create visual tributes to black experiences that could counter derogatory representations and help to forge a place for African Americans in US narratives of nationhood. Fuller's public works thus formed part of a wider cultural effort by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson to stake a claim for African Americans’ rights to full citizenship. Emancipation (1913), a rare national monument to those who endured slavery that still stands in Harriet Tubman Square in Boston a century after its creation, serves as a testament to the cultural significance of Fuller's aesthetic vision.

Ater's study is both biography and social history. In contrast to the previous limited scholarship on Fuller, which restricted its focus to the sculptor's life and artistry, Ater situates her work as a “multivocal conversation” between the artist, her patrons and her contemporary audience (7). In so doing, Ater recuperates the background to and reception of Fuller's work and presents new insights into the racial ideologies that she was forced to negotiate. Charting Fuller's life experiences to uncover the impact of domestic pressures and racist cultural attitudes on her career, Ater also offers a careful reading of the ambivalences and class issues that underpinned her working environment and art. Claiming that Fuller “reconceived the black body” in ways that challenged racist distortions and “sought to reclaim the dignity of African Americans” (1), Ater is nevertheless sensitive to Fuller as a “‘multitudinous individual’ living a rich and complicated life” (7). Fuller's early work in particular adhered to early twentieth-century black elites’ concerns with racial “uplift,” an ideology by which they sought to distance themselves from the apparently socially degraded state of their enslaved predecessors in favour of Eurocentric notions of “civility.” Ater's nuanced reading draws out these concerns, showing how Fuller's sculptures frequently exemplified Progressive Era formulations of race, identity and culture even as they presented new and celebratory depictions of black subjectivities. For example, in the Warrick Tableaux (1907), the sculptor designed crude, dark-skinned, barely attired figurines to invoke the apparently pre-civilized state of America's first enslaved men and women. Conversely, she depicted modern-day African Americans as well dressed and light-skinned to suggest that a racial “evolution” had taken place since slavery.

Ater's first chapter sets out Fuller's achievements and career hindrances, including the warehouse fire that destroyed most of her early work, her demanding husband, and a racist art world. The author devotes the remainder of the text to three of Fuller's public works, the Warrick Tableaux, Emancipation and Ethiopia (1921), each of which was commissioned for a major exposition, and which serve forcefully to illuminate the social restrictions imposed on Progressive Era black artistry. In directing her attention to Fuller's exposition work, Ater excavates African Americans’ attempt to stake a claim in events that were notorious for their elisions and distortions of black history. Since the late nineteenth century, expositions had served as sites by which European and US governments laid claim to be the most economically and culturally “advanced” and hence “civilized” nation. As the US developed into an imperial power, expositions functioned as potent beacons of colonial propaganda. At such events, Africans and Native Americans were frequently exhibited in anthropological displays to assert European “racial” primacy. By contrast, black cultural producers found their work segregated from the main exhibits, or excluded altogether. Ater explores Fuller's work to show how such events served as microcosms of the nation's segregationist policies. For example, the Warrick Tableaux was a series of fourteen dioramas incorporating 130 two-foot-tall plastic figures that traced African American history from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth. Conceived for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907), an event otherwise concerned with southern white manhood, Fuller's ambitious project was segregated in a special “Negro Building.”

Yet Ater also traces expositions’ psychological and cultural significance for Progressive Era African American intellectuals who read them as sites by which they could assert their humanity and write themselves into US historical narratives. Emancipation, a stand-alone sculpture exhibited at the National Emancipation Exposition, was constructed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of US slavery. Ater underscores the significance of such a commemorative monument at a time when dominant Civil War narratives elided slavery and emancipation in favour of sectional reconciliation. Equally, Ethiopia, another stand-alone sculpture, was commissioned for the America's Making Exposition (1921), an event that celebrated immigrant contributions to US society. African Americans were included in the exhibition as “honorary immigrants” (102). Such a brazen mislabelling of Africans’ violent displacement onto America's shores emphasizes the extent to which Progressive Era cultural narratives excluded black historical experiences. Yet, as Ater elucidates, many black elites accepted this description, believing that this small concession to showcase their contributions to US society outweighed the indignities of such a term.

Ater's richly researched study makes possible a much fuller appreciation of Fuller's art and its social context. The author notes that analysis of Fuller's work has traditionally centred on Ethiopia. Yet Ater's readings suggest that it is Emancipation, Fuller's monument to African Americans’ freedom from slavery, that is the most compelling and provocative of the sculptor's public works. Ater contrasts this sculpture with emancipation iconography by three of Fuller's African American forebears: John Quincy Adams Ward's The Freedman (1863); Edmonia Lewis's Forever Free (1867); and Thomas Ball's Freedmen's Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (1876). Ater reads Emancipation as a rejection of the gender and racial codes that underpinned these works, in which black women were either omitted or rendered passive, and in which broken chains and cowering figures were used to signify black abjection. Such monuments played into white abolitionist iconography, which depicted freedom as a “gift” bestowed by the enslaving society. Ater argues persuasively that, in contrast to her predecessors, Fuller rejected such demeaning visual narratives in order to focus on the psychological effect of suddenly acquired freedom, thereby lending an interior voice and human dignity to those formerly enslaved. In the sculpture, a male and a female subject stand authoritatively to stake their own claims for freedom without recourse to white paternalism. By rendering such figures partially nude and by giving them features that were clearly African in origin, Fuller dared to intervene in associations of black bodies with labour and promiscuity in order to stake a claim to European configurations of physical beauty.

Remaking Race and History is a compelling study of a neglected but important artist. Yet, for all the text's achievements in recuperating Fuller's life and work, its sheer breadth means that a number of fascinating ideas could perhaps have been more fully explored. Ater expresses an intention to “place Fuller in the text as an active agent in her life story and her art making” (7). It is therefore slightly disappointing, if perhaps a consequence of the limits of primary source material and the text's wide-ranging scope, that Fuller's voice rarely emerges alongside the text's exploration of her art. Consequently, there is a sense that her “multitudinous” personality could be extrapolated further. For example, Fuller's contrasting explorations of black nudity – to signify savagery in the Warrick Tableaux and to convey the psychological effect of freedom in Emancipation – hint at an evolving attitude to racial representation.

Ater also observes that Fuller deviated from her patron Du Bois's instructions when she conceived Emancipation and Ethiopia and that the celebrated black intellectual was initially displeased with the former sculpture. Such conflict is compelling, especially given early twentieth-century race leaders’ increasing fixation on black women as dutiful wives and mothers rather than as citizens in their own right. The young woman in Emancipation resists such a subjugating social narrative. Instead, she leads her male partner by taking the first step into freedom. Similarly, Du Bois's initial vision for Ethiopia was striking in its passivity. He expected her to display “closed eyes and on the cheek a slight trace of tears” (103). Instead, Fuller depicted a “female figure emerging from the wrappings of a mummy with hands upraised, symbolizing the self-emancipation of that race from ignorance into educated, self-reliant citizens and makers of America” (103). Such contrasting visions deserve further exploration. They point to a potentially significant distinction in Fuller and Du Bois's attitudes as to how not only “blackness” but also gender ought to be represented.

Moreover, Ater ends her discussion of Ethiopia by noting facial similarities between Fuller and the sculpture and makes the fascinating assertion that the work may have been autobiographical. Given the rarity of self-portraits by black women artists in the early twentieth century, this is a potentially revelatory claim. Such an assertion could help to shed light both on the vision of black female subjectivity that Fuller intended to create when she crafted Ethiopia and on her sense of identity as a Progressive Era black woman artist. Yet the claim is made in the concluding paragraph of the text's final chapter, leaving no space in the text for a full consideration of Fuller's authorial intentions.

However, it is a testament to the scope of Ater's project and to the neglect of her subject that these minor criticisms can be laid. Remaking Race and History is a wide-ranging intervention into Fuller's career and a beautifully illustrated visual document of many of her key works. The text is both a recuperation of the sculptor's art and a study in the racist occlusions of Progressive Era US culture. By focussing in particular on Fuller's exposition work and its social context, it adds to a burgeoning awareness of the ways in which early twentieth-century black artists and intellectuals engaged with public events to challenge racist attitudes and assert African Americans’ place in US national narratives.