Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman

by Jeffreen M. Hayes, Howard Dodson (Introduction), Kirsten Pai Buick (Contributor)

This is a timely, visual, exploration of the fascinating life and lasting legacy of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination to become one of America's most influential twentieth-century artists. Her story is one of community-building, activism, and art education. Born just outside Jacksonville, Florida, Savage left the South to pursue new opportunities and opened a studio in Harlem, New York City, offering free art classes. She co-founded the Harlem Artists’ Guild in 1935 and became the first director of the federally-supported Harlem Community Art Center. Through her leadership there, Savage played an instrumental role in the development of many William Artis, Gwendolyn Knight, Gwendolyn Bennett, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Blackburn, Romare Bearden, among many others. This ground-breaking volume features fifty works by Savage, and those she mentored or influenced, as well as correspondence and period photographs.

Genres: Art, Art History, Biography

156 pages, Hardcover

Published October 23, 2018

Reviews

[Jackie Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing talent, against so many odds. We can only wonder what she could have been without racial and sexual restriction. And infuriatingly - most of her most monumental works no longer exist today, because she could not afford to cast them in bronze. It is we who lose. Imagine if we had monuments like "Realization" and "The Harp" in the place of the confederate ones that dot our nation's cities.

Realization

The Harp

[Kim Tyo-Dickerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In 1937, the sculptor Augusta Savage was commissioned to create a sculpture that would appear at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens, N.Y. Savage was one of only four women, and the only Black artist, to receive a commission for the fair. In her studio in Harlem, she created “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a 16-foot sculpture cast in plaster and inspired by the song of the same name — often called the Black national anthem — written by her friend, James Weldon Johnson, who had died in 1938" (The Black Woman Artist Who Crafted a Life She Was Told She Couldn’t Have" via The New York Times)

All I can think when I read about Augusta Savage's hard-won life and courageous art, stunning in comparison to what should have been insurmountable odds stacked against her as a poor, Black woman from a large conservative family in Florida, is why hasn't someone with power, influence and money re-created and cast her lost masterpiece Lift Every Voice and Sing or The Harp? I read this catalog from the Cummer Museum's exhibition in 2018-2019 in preparation for reading Marilyn Nelson's Novel in Verse Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life, and highly recommend this insightful look into Savage's career as a sculptor, as well as a teacher and activist as discussed in the opening essay "Labor, Love, Legacy: Augusta Savage's Art" by Jeffreen M. Hayes:

[Jbondandrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book about Augusta Savage. Other African American artists were featured, there was one photograph of three children creating with clay. I especially liked the girl standing on the worktable working on her own piece.

[Twinkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book about a pioneering Black woman artist.