Augusta Savage, black sculptor, Harlem Renaissance

[Beringia]

https://www.everypicture.org/augusta-savage

I was watching a movie called The League, a biography of black baseball players and they showed Augusta making a deer sculpture, so I looked her up




Augusta Savage left the WPA in 1937 to work on a life-sized sculptural commission for the 1939 New York World's Fair committee, inspired by James Weldon Johnson's poem 'Lift Every Voice', written in 1900 and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson in 1905.

Often called 'The African American National Anthem', the sung poem quickly became a way for African Americans to demonstrate patriotism while subtly speaking out against racism and Jim Crow Laws.

Savage did not have funds to move or store her monumental sculpture when the Fair ended and tragically the original work was destroyed. A small number of souvenir versions were cast by the artist including the present work.

This sculpture marks the end of Savage's too brief career as an important and influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She left New York by the mid-1940s to live reclusively in Saugerties, New York where she turned to writing

Here is a 4 minute video about her on PBS

https://illinois.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/savage-and-the-harlem-renaissance-video-gallery/searching-for-augusta-savage/

[Tom Dyer]

1. Fantastic!

Thank you for sharing -