Augusta Savage: The Harlem Sculptor who Lifted Every Voice Through Art

Explore the life of the iconic artist, activist, and educator who fought to carve out her career, while launching many others

Both artist and teacher throughout her career, the sculptor Augusta Savage was deeply embedded in the Harlem Renaissance, her work both emerging from and feeding into a creative community that fostered African American culture.

Here we explore who Augusta Savage was, the obstacles she faced as a woman and a Black artist, and the impact her sculptures still have on the world.

Savage mostly worked with affordable materials such as clay and plaster, rendering her patron’s busts and the faces of street children alike, with compassion and care. But as a result, much of her work became damaged and has been lost. And due to the lack of diversity in galleries and art history collections, her achievements have frequently been overlooked.

Yet, her legacy is solid as stone: Savage is now renowned as a cornerstone of American sculpture. At every step of her journey, when something blocked her way, she carved a new path.

Who was Augusta Savage? The early makings of an artist

Born Augusta Christine Fells in 1892, she came into a world on the brink of rapid change, but also a world where her artistic expression was challenged early on. Clay pits and mineral springs were common around her Florida home, where she would sit and make clay animals. But her father, a deeply religious man, violently forbade her from making art. Augusta was married young in 1907, but her first husband died just after their daughter Irene’s birth.

In 1915, the whole family moved to West Palm Beach, where her creative life slowly transformed. This was the year her school principal noticed her talent and encouraged her to teach clay modeling to other students. She also married her second husband James Savage, whose name she would keep despite their later divorce.

In 1919, Augusta ran a booth at a County Fair and won a prize for her animal sculptures, along with a reference which she could take with her to New York to pursue art as a serious career.

New beginnings in New York City

When Savage arrived in New York, so too had the Harlem Renaissance. Thousands of African American families moved north in the Great Migration, and New York became the epicenter for a cultural explosion.

Novelists, musicians, artists, and activists fought to ensure that Black Americans were recognized for their contributions to the culture. Jazz, poetry, and painted murals proliferated around the area, filling it with texture and color.

Savage couldn’t afford the tuition fees for the American School of Sculpture, but she didn’t let that stop her. Encouraged by sculptor Soron Borglum, she beat 142 male applicants to a place at Cooper Union. There she excelled, completing her course in three years rather than the usual four. When she lost a cleaning job she had used to support herself, the school offered her a scholarship to cover boarding.

Throughout her career, Savage maintained a realist and compassionate approach, with smooth sculptures at every scale, thoughtfully posed. She would go on to capture many important figures, telling the story of her community while creating a sense of pride and elegance in their depictions, rejecting racial stereotypes.

How her community led to a breakthrough

On graduating, Savage applied to a Summer arts program in France, but the American selection committee rejected her due to her race. What ensued was an appeal process and lots of press coverage, raising awareness of the racism Black artists faced. Augusta was devastated, committing herself to the cause of uplifting herself and other Black female artists.

Times were tough for both Savage and the people she loved in the mid-1920s. Her father had been taken ill, drawing many of her family members to come and live with her in New York. She worked cleaning jobs to support everyone and she married again, yet lost her third husband to pneumonia. When she won a scholarship to study in Rome, she found that, while tuition was covered, she could not afford the living expenses.

However, during this difficult time she also won her first significant commissions, sculpting busts of prominent activists and journalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and William Pickens Sr.

Then, Savage’s supporters changed her life. Many were inspired by her smaller sculptures of Harlem residents, including Gamin (below). With an influx of grants and donations, in 1929 she was finally able to travel to France.

Here, she truly discovered her voice, realizing that some of her teachers wanted her to reproduce similar work to theirs. She broke out on her own, and her community back in the US were there to support her. Donations allowed her to enroll at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière. She began to exhibit and her fame grew, seeing her win two awards and travel around Europe with her art.

Building a legacy: Savage’s return to Harlem

After her studies and success, Savage returned to New York to foster the community that had helped her. She was the first African American woman to become part of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and opened her own studio in Harlem where she began teaching. Her students included such iconic names as Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight.

Her school would go on to develop into the Harlem Community Art Center, which in its first year and a half welcomed 70,000 visitors and students. Art had become accessible to the Harlem neighborhood, with many young artists getting their start there.

Perhaps the peak of her fame came with her sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing (also known as The Harp) for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. In a world poised once again on the edge of war, Savage’s work celebrated music and togetherness.

Named after the poem by James Weldon Johnson, it was the largest of her works at sixteen feet high, with the "strings" of the harp made up of twelve singers. A large arm cradled them, representing God, and at the front a man knelt and held the music. The sculpture was made from plaster and treated to resemble basalt. It was incredibly popular, with replicas sold in metal, but there was no funding to store or maintain it after the fair, so it was destroyed.

Despite all of her achievements, Savage had little money in later life, but moved to a farmhouse where she continued to teach art to friends and neighbors, began writing stories, and took a local job helping with cancer research.

She gave a voice to the voiceless through art

Though her life ended with solitude and little recognition, Savage was dedicated to the people around her from beginning to end. She spoke through the students who came after her, and her surviving work speaks for itself.

In her words:

“I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.”

—T. R. Poston, “Augusta Savage,” Metropolitan Magazine, Jan 1935

When the world said no, Savage answered yes. She shaped her work and her life around uplifting her community and the people whose lives she aimed to depict. Though so much of her work is lost, what little we have demonstrates resolve and hope.

Want to tell your own stories and capture moments through sculpture and visual art? Explore our sculpture courses, or figure drawing courses.

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