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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.
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
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....