Augusta Savage

Augusta Christine Fells was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida, on the twenty-ninth of February 1892, the seventh of fourteen children of a Methodist minister who actively discouraged her childhood interest in sculpting figures from the red clay of the Florida riverbeds. She left home for Jacksonville at sixteen, married briefly, and continued sculpting against family opposition.

She moved to New York in 1921 and was admitted to Cooper Union — completing the four-year sculpture program in three years and on a scholarship. In 1923 she was admitted to the prestigious Académie Fontainebleau summer program in France — and then, on review of her name and racial background by the program's organizing committee, the admission was rescinded. The case became a public controversy through the African American press. Savage continued her studies in New York and later in France through her own organizing.

She returned to Harlem in 1932 and founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts at 163 West 143rd Street — the principal art-education institution of the Harlem Renaissance generation. She taught Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence (also placed in this archive), Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Romare Bearden (also placed in this archive), and Ernest Crichlow, among many others. She refused tuition from students who could not afford to pay.

She received commissions for the 1939 New York World's Fair (her sixteen-foot sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, on the cadence of the James Weldon Johnson hymn — also placed in this archive — was destroyed at the close of the Fair, as no funds were available to cast it in bronze). She founded the Harlem Community Art Center under WPA sponsorship and directed it through the late 1930s.

She withdrew to a farm in Saugerties, New York, in the 1940s. She died of cancer in New York on the twenty-sixth of March 1962, age seventy.

She is honored here as the sculptor whose studio trained the visual generation of the Harlem Renaissance.