Augusta Savage

From Florida to an open studio

Born Augusta Christine Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida, Savage moved to New York in 1921 and entered Cooper Union. Study in Paris enlarged her training. On returning to Harlem, she opened her studio to people seeking free art instruction, linking her own practice to opportunities for others.

Commissions included portraits of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Her teaching helped artists including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight and Norman Lewis. These were developing careers, not simply a list of later celebrities attached to her name.

Sources for this section: [1] · [3]

Institutions and a conspicuous commission

Savage became director of the Harlem Community Art Center in 1937. For the 1939 New York World’s Fair she made the monumental sculpture known as The Harp, drawing on Lift Every Voice and Sing. The plaster work received a dark finish suggesting another material. No funds secured a permanent metal casting or storage, and the monument was destroyed.

The composition joined a choir of figures to the form of a harp. Later exhibition interpretation connects it to Black cultural life and public visibility.

Its disappearance should not erase the labour that preceded it. Training students, negotiating institutions and producing a major temporary work were interlocking parts of Savage’s career, even though the surviving record cannot give each equal physical presence.

Sources for this section: [2] · [6]

After the fair

Her Salon of Contemporary Negro Art closed after financial difficulties. She later lived in Saugerties, taught local children, made some portrait sculpture and wrote stories that remained unpublished. She returned to New York near the end of her life and died in 1962.

The Cummer Museum’s later exhibition presented her as an artist and community organiser, bringing her own work into dialogue with artists whose careers she helped develop.

Small metal versions of the fair sculpture survive, but their survival is a different proposition from the survival of the full-size plaster. Keeping those objects distinct preserves both her achievement and the extent of the loss.

Sources for this section: [2] · [1]