Augusta Savage was a sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance whose portrait busts and figures of Black subjects won her international study and recognition, and who fought openly against the racism of the American art establishment. As a teacher and as the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center, she built the institutions that trained Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Norman Lewis, and other artists who defined Black American art at mid-century.
At a Glance
- Born
- 29 February 1892, Green Cove Springs, Florida
- Died
- 26 March 1962, New York, New York
- Birth name
- Augusta Fells
- Known for
- Gamin (c. 1929); Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp) (1939); Harlem Community Art Center (director, 1937)
- HBCU ties
- Florida A&M University (Attended for about a year before leaving to study art in New York)
- Fields
- Art · Education
- Era
- Letters, Arts & Sciences
Early Life
Savage was born Augusta Fells on 29 February 1892 in Green Cove Springs, Florida, the seventh of fourteen children of Edward and Cornelia Fells. As a child she modeled small animals from the local red clay, over the opposition of her father, who tried to stamp out her interest in art.
She married John T. Moore in 1907, at fifteen, and was soon widowed. Around 1915 she married a carpenter named Savage, whose surname she kept for the rest of her career. The family moved to West Palm Beach, where in 1919 she won a prize for her sculpture at the county fair; the fair’s superintendent encouraged her to go to New York to train.
Life and Work
By 1921 Savage was studying at Cooper Union in New York, and she completed its four-year program in three. She became a fixture at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, the center of Harlem’s intellectual life and the forerunner of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and won commissions for portrait busts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. In 1923 she married Robert L. Poston, an official of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; he died in 1924.
In 1923 Savage was selected for a summer art program for American women at Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and then rejected when the organizers learned she was Black. She protested publicly rather than accept the decision quietly, waging a letter-writing campaign and publishing a letter in the New York World, and the controversy made her nationally known as a critic of racial exclusion in the arts.
Her bust Gamin, a portrait of her nephew Ellis Ford as a Harlem street child, won her a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship in 1929, and, with additional support from the Carnegie Foundation, she studied in Paris from 1929 to 1931 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where her teachers included the sculptors Félix Benneteau-Desgrois and Charles Despiau. Works from these years include La Citadelle—Freedom (1930). She returned to a Harlem in the depths of the Depression and in 1932 opened the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, offering instruction to children and adults. In 1934 she became the first African American member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and in 1935 she was a founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild.
In 1937 she became the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center, established under the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which offered Harlem residents classes in painting, sculpture, and crafts. Among the young artists she taught or mentored were Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Gwendolyn Knight, whose portrait bust she modeled in the mid-1930s; Knight and Lawrence later married. In 1939 she opened the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art in Harlem, a rare professional exhibition space for Black artists, who were routinely excluded from white-run galleries; it was short-lived for lack of money. She is the first Black woman known to have founded an art gallery in the United States.
For the 1939 New York World’s Fair she received a commission for a major sculpture, and took leave from the art center to complete it. Lift Every Voice and Sing, inspired by the song by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, depicted a line of Black singers forming the strings of a harp. Exhibited outside the fair’s Contemporary Arts Building, the plaster sculpture stood about sixteen feet high and was reportedly among the fair’s most visited works. Without funds to cast it in bronze, it was destroyed when the fair closed and survives chiefly in photographs, including images by Carl Van Vechten.
Legacy
After the fair Savage lost her directorship of the art center and found few new commissions; one of her last significant works was The Pugilist (1942), a figure of a boxer. In 1945 she moved to Saugerties, New York, in the Catskills, where she lived quietly, taught children, worked for a time as a laboratory assistant in cancer research, and wrote fiction that went unpublished. She died in New York City on 26 March 1962.
Much of Savage’s sculpture was made in plaster or clay because she could not afford bronze, and many works are lost. Her reputation has been rebuilt by exhibitions and scholarship treating her as both an artist and an institution builder, among them the exhibition Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, shown at the New-York Historical Society. Savage herself described her students as her lasting work: as the Smithsonian American Art Museum records, she said that if she could inspire young people to develop the talent she knew they possessed, their achievements would be her monument. Historians of Black art credit her schools, her advocacy for WPA employment of Black artists, and her refusal to accept exclusion with opening professional art careers to a generation of Harlem artists.
An artist’s work can include building institutions: through her teaching and the Harlem Community Art Center, Savage opened doors for a generation of Black artists that the art establishment had tried to keep closed. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 29 February 1892 Born Augusta Christine Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida.
- 1919 Wins a prize for sculpture at a county fair in West Palm Beach.
- 1921 Studying at Cooper Union in New York.
- 1923 Rejected from a Fontainebleau summer program because she is Black; protests publicly.
- 1929 Gamin wins her a Rosenwald fellowship; studies in Paris until 1931.
- 1932 Opens the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem.
- 1934 First African American member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
- 1937 Becomes first director of the Harlem Community Art Center.
- 1939 Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp) shown at the New York World’s Fair.
- 26 March 1962 Dies in New York City.
Sources and Further Reading
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Augusta Savage.” Link
- New York Public Library, Schomburg Center, “Augusta Savage” research guide. Link
- National Humanities Center, The Making of African American Identity, vol. 3, “Augusta Savage, Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939.” Link
- The Art Story, “Augusta Savage.” Link
- Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
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