Augusta+Savage

by kindergarten, first and second grade students

Augusta Savage created sculptures. She was born in Florida in 1892. Her father did not like her doing art. She said her father "Almost whipped all the art out of me".

Augusta used clay from the ground to make figures. She looked around and thought of ideas of what she could make in her own style.

Augusta was fifteen when she got married. She had a baby and her baby was a girl. Her child was named Irene. Several years later Augusta's husband died. Then she got a new husband, but they got divorced. After the divorce, Augusta got another new husband, but he died.

Augusta wanted to go to Harlem so she left her daughter with her parents. She went to Harlem in the 1920's during the Harlem Renaissance. When she got to Harlem she had $4.50. Then she got a job as a caretaker in an apartment building. After that she joined Cooper Union which was an art school.

Augusta was so good at art that after awhile she opened her own art school. She became the person who ran the Harlem Community Center. She taught Morgan and Marvin Smith. And she taught children art, and one of her students was Jacob Lawrence.

Augusta made a sculpture of her nephew and she won a Rosenwald Fellowship to go to Paris. She stayed there about three years.

In 1939 the World's Fair Committee asked Augusta Savage to make something that represented African American culture and she made a harp. She made it out of plaster and it looked like a hand holding people singing high notes and singing low notes. She meant for the harp to represent "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson.

Some people say that the World's Fair might have destroyed the harp after the fair, and some say it was lost. And some say somebody might have stolen it.

Augusta moved to the Catskills in 1945, and later moved back to the city. In 1963 she died at the age of seventy. She died way too young, because her art was important. She loved to do art, and teach people art, and people were sad because she died. Now we remember her by her art and her sculpture.