PROPHET IN A MARBLE VEIL

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was mixed-race: mother African American, father Native American. She scrubbed floors to put herself through art school becoming the first Black woman to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design —class of 1918. Prophet set her eyes on Paris to study her passion — sculpture and in 1922, boarded the S.S. La France. She studied with the masters, while sculpting in a wretched hovel. In 1924, she made her debut at the Salon d'Automne and Sociéte des Artistes Français in Paris, making a splash on the international stage.

Prophet’s world became a veritable ‘who’s who’ —from Vanderbilts to the Astors to W.E.B. DuBois (rumored to be her lover). Everyone wanted a piece of Prophet. But she was going without food to buy marble and tools. Starvation ate away at her inner self, as well as the outer, even as she was creating incredible art.

The themes reflected in Prophet’s sculptures —poverty, dislocation, identity, gender, race, and the right to be seen— form the themes of this film, delving also into the capricious nature of fame, patrons, and lovers. The first woman-of-color exhibited in the Whitney met with institutionalization and a lonely death. But not before igniting a cultural firestorm!

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