RECOGNIZING BLACK TALENT

In contrast to the work of Edmonia Lewis, is  a modern sculptress, of no less talent.

AUGUSTA SAVAGE, born in  1892,  was an American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was a teacher whose studio was important to the careers of a generation of artists who would become nationally known. She  also worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.

 

Augusta began making figures as a child, mostly small animals out of the natural red clay of her hometown, Green Cove Springs Florida. Her father was a poor Methodist minister who strongly opposed his daughter's early interest in art. "My father licked me four or five times a week,” Augusta once recalled, “and almost whipped all the art out of me.” This was because at that time, he believed her sculpture to be a sinful practice, based upon his interpretation of the "graven images" portion of the Bible. She persevered, and the principal of her new high school in West Palm Beach, where her family relocated in 1915, encouraged her talent and allowed her to teach a clay modeling class. This began a lifelong commitment to teaching as well as to creating art.

She arrived in New York City in 1921, applying  to Cooper Union, a scholarship-based school. She was selected before 142 other men on the waiting list.[ Her talent and ability so impressed the Cooper Union Advisory Council that she was awarded additional funds for room and board.  She studied under sculptor George Brewster completing the four-year degree course in three years.

In 1923 she applied for a Summer art program sponsored by the French government; although being more than qualified, she was turned down by the international judging committee solely because they refused to award a spot to a Black person. Augusta was deeply upset and questioned the committee, beginning the first of many public fights for equal rights in her life. Though appeals were made to the French government to reinstate the award, they had no effect and Augusta was unable to study at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts. The incident got press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually, the sole supportive committee member sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil – who at one time had shared a studio with Henry Ossawa Tanner – invited her to study with him. She later cited him as one of her teachers.

She obtained her first commission for a bust of W. E. B. Du Bois for the Harlem Library. Her outstanding sculpture brought more commissions. Her bust of William Pickens Sr., a key figure in the NAACP, earned praise for depicting an African American in a more humane, neutral way as opposed to stereotypes of the time.

In 1928 Augusta won the Otto Kahn Prize in an exhibition at The Harmon Foundation with her submission Head of a Negro. She was an outspoken critic of the fetishization of the "negro primitive" aesthetic favored by white patrons at the time. She publicly critiqued the director of The Harmon Foundation, Mary Beattie Brady, for her low standards for Black art and lack of understanding in the area of visual arts in general.

In 1929 with pooled resources from the Urban League, Rosenwald Foundation, a Carnegie Foundation grant, and donations from friends and former teachers, Augusta  was finally able to travel to France when she was 37. She lived on Montparnasse and worked in the studio of M. [Félix] Benneteau [-Desgrois].

While the studio was initially encouraging of her work, Augusta later wrote that "...the masters are not in sympathy as they all have their own definite ideas and usually wish their pupils to follow their particular method..." and began primarily working on her own in 1930.

Knowledge of Augusta's talent and struggles became widespread in the African-American community; fundraising parties were held in Harlem and Greenwich Village, and African-American women's groups and teachers from Florida A&M all sent her money for studies abroad.

In 1929, with assistance as well from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Savage enrolled and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a leading Paris art school. In Paris, she studied with the sculptor Charles Despiau. She exhibited and won awards in two Paris Salons and one Exposition. She toured France, Belgium, and Germany, researching sculpture in cathedrals and museums.

Augusta returned to the United States in 1931, energized from her studies and achievements, but The Great Depression had almost stopped art sales. She pushed on, and in 1934 became the first African-American artist to be elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. She then launched the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, located in a basement on West 143rd Street in Harlem. She opened her studio to anyone who wanted to paint, draw, or sculpt.

 Her many young students included the future nationally known artists Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Gwendolyn Knight. Another student was the sociologist Kenneth B. Clark whose later research contributed to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Her school evolved into the Harlem Community Art Center; 1500 people of all ages and abilities participated in her workshops, learning from her multi-cultural staff, and showing work around New York City. Funds from the Works Progress Administration helped, but old struggles of discrimination were revived between Savage and WPA officials who objected to her having a leadership role.

Augusta was one of four women and only two African Americans to receive a professional commission from the Board of Design of the 1939 New York World's Fair. She created Lift Every Voice and Sing (also known as "The Harp"), inspired by the song by James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson. The 16-foot-tall plaster sculpture was the most popular and most photographed work at the fair; small metal souvenir copies were sold, and many postcards of the piece were purchased. The work reinterpreted the musical instrument to feature 12 singing African-American youth in graduated heights as its strings, with the harp's sounding board transformed into an arm and a hand. In the front, a kneeling young man offered music in his hands. She did not have funds to have it cast in bronze or to move and store it. Like other temporary installations, the sculpture was destroyed at the close of the fair.

Augusta opened two galleries whose shows were well attended and well reviewed, but few sales resulted and the galleries closed. The last major showing of her work occurred in 1939. Deeply depressed by her financial struggle, in the 1940s she moved to a farmhouse in Saugerties, New York. While there, she established close ties with her neighbors and welcomed family and friends from New York City to her rural home. She cultivated a garden and sold pigeons, chickens, and eggs.  She taught art to children and wrote children's stories.

The K-B Products Corporation, the world's largest growers of mushrooms at that time, employed her as a laboratory assistant in the company's cancer research facility. She acquired a car and learned to drive to enable her commute. Herman K. Knaust, director of the laboratory, encouraged Augusta to pursue her artistic career and provided her with art supplies. She created and taught art and sculpted friends and neighbors. Her last commissioned work was for Knaust and was that of the American journalist and author Poultney Bigelow, whose father, John, was U.S. Minister to France during the Civil War. Her few neighbors said that she was always making something with her hands.

Much of her work is in clay or plaster, as she could not often afford bronze. One of her most famous busts is titled “Gamin” which is on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; a life-sized version is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. At the time of its creation, Gamin, which is modeled after a Harlem youth, was voted most popular in an exhibition of over 200 works by black artists. 

Her style can be described as realistic, expressive, and sensitive. Though her art and influence within the art community are documented, the location of much of her work is unknown.

Augusta died of cancer on March 26, 1962, in New York City. While she was all but forgotten at the time of her death, she is remembered today as a great artist, activist, and arts educator; serving as an inspiration to the many that she taught, helped, and encouraged.