Museums rarely build a permanent space around a single artist's life, but doing so can transform how an institution understands its own collection. The Danforth Art Museum's relationship to Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose family gifted nearly 400 works to the museum in 2006, has evolved through building a hard-won permanent gallery and a recreated studio space modeled on a single surviving photograph.
In this episode, Jessica Roscio, director and curator at the Danforth Art Museum, and Rachel Passannante, the museum's associate curator, discuss how they built Fuller's permanent gallery after the museum's 2019 relocation, the ongoing research challenges posed by undocumented and unattributed works, and their continued relationship with the Fuller family, including descendant David Fuller in Framingham. They describe the 1910 fire that destroyed much of Fuller's early body of work, the recovery of her career through later commissions including Ethiopia Awakening, and the more than century-old scrapbook recently donated to the museum, now digitized and accessible through the Danforth's website.
This special series of Atelier was produced in conjunction with a three-day symposium dedicated to celebrating the work and life of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Across these conversations, we bring together scholars, curators, and other special guests to revisit her legacy and situate it within its historical moment.
The symposium and podcast series were made possible with support from the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Terra Foundation for American Art, and with the participation of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University.
Website - globalcenters.columbia.edu/paris
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Host: Marie Doezema
Production: Marie Doezema, Tessa Overvoorde, and Anthony Valette
Editing: Theo Albaric
Music: Robert Schumann’s Rêverie performed by Magdalena Stern-Baczewska
The Columbia Global Paris Center is part of a network of 11 global centers of Columbia University in the City of New York, one of the world's leading academic institutions. The centers serve as knowledge hubs that aim to educate and inspire through research, dialogue, and action. They advance understanding, facilitate partnerships, and build the bridges necessary to tackle our changing world.
Columbia Global brings together the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
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