”Sculptor Augusta Savage was one
of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance as well as an influential
activist and arts educator.”The Biography.com
Augusta Savage (1892–1962) was an
African-American woman who gravitated toward sculpture from a young age despite
adversity. This adversity came from her father who as a minister discouraged
her God-given talent. The other forms of adversity she faced were racism and
poverty. In the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance, she earned a scholarship
at the Cooper Union in New York City. In 1923 she was rejected for a French art
scholarship due to her race. The economic difficulties of the Great Depression
(1930s) made commissions hard to come by. She did earn a commission to craft a
sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. She created The Harp. “Standing 16
feet tall, 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.” This monumental work was destroyed at
the end of the fair. This artwork does survive in photographs and a colorized video from the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York City.
Augusta Savage Biography
Augusta Savage "The Harp" 1930's African American Sculpture
