Returning to Reid Hall with Robert O’Meally and Brune Biebuyck

Atelier · Sep 3, 2026 · 45m

An institution founded to welcome American women artists once turned Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller away at the door. Decades later, bringing a symposium on Fuller to that same place, Reid Hall, was a deliberate act of reckoning.

In this episode, Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and Brune Biebuyck, director of Reid Hall and the Columbia Global Paris Center, reflect on what the symposium uncovered—and where it might lead next. O’Meally considers Fuller alongside figures including Bessie Smith, Frederick Douglass, and Henry…