Reclaimed Legacies and Radical Futures

She is smaller than you might expect, slightly under life-size and elevated to her full sixty-seven inches by a small pedestal.1 Her eyes are open, alert. Despite attempts led by the sculpture's commissioners to christen her Ethiopia Awakening, there is no doubt, on close examination, that she is fully awake. Little wonder that her creator, the pioneering Black sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, preferred the more straightforwardly declarative appellation Ethiopia. Ethiopia's lips are loosely parted and curved in the slight smile exclusive to the cool, calm, and confident, and she casts her gaze over her left shoulder, above a left arm hanging loose and hand slightly arched away from her thigh. Her right hand clasps to her chest the free end of the wrappings elsewhere tightly binding her legs in the mummy's classic monomember. She is, as they say, feeling herself. And why shouldn't she be? She appears young, self-possessed, and regal, the folds of a nemes headcloth framing her face.