While the "Ash Can" realists were depicting urban po,verty,/Afri'can. American sculp tor Meta. Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) was using her works in plaster and bronze to .comment on race relations. Like other American artists of her day, the Philadelphia-born Fuller studied in Paris but returned home to take on American themes. A commissioned tableau for the Jamestown Exposition of 1907 — 150 figures representing the progress of blacks throughout U.S. history— was her, first major work with an African American theme. Others soon followed. In 1913, at the request of her friend W. E. B. Du Bois, she created Spirit of Emancipation for a fiftieth-anniyersary celebrationof the Emancipation Proclamation. "Her Mary Turner(A Silent. Protest Against Mob Violence) (1919) is a condemnation'of lynching, and her Ethiopia Awakening (1914)—an African woman looking ahead as her bonds fall away — was exhibited at the 1922 Making of...