Augusta Savage

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. And I didn't go to art school, but I love learning about art anyway.

Betty: And I’m Betty. I also didn't go to art school, but I also really love learning about art and I'm ready to learn even more today.

Quinn: Today we are doing just an old fashioned let's learn about an artist together episode, and that is all about the sculptor Augusta Savage.

Betty: I have not heard of this artist before, so I will be learning a hundred percent today, I believe.

Quinn: All right, this is going to be so fun then. I also had not heard of Augusta Savage before. I don't remember when she first came across my radar, but it was relatively recently. And I think I first noticed her just cause I thought she had the world's coolest name. And so I was like, got to learn more about this woman. And then I looked into her life and she had such an interesting life and such an amazing career. And so I'm so excited to tell you about her.

Betty: Amazing.

Quinn: The basic tagline of Augusta Savage is that she was a figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Like I mentioned at the top, she was a sculptor. She also was an incredible teacher and mentor towards a whole generation of Black artists. And she was largely unappreciated for—well, I say that, she did have success in her life as an artist, but at the time of her death she was largely under appreciated and unappreciated. Because the barriers that she faced prevented her from achieving the kind of like success in her lifetime that her trajectory should have led her to. But since that time she has been rediscovered and more documented and appreciated in the years after.

Betty: I mean, I just kind of quickly Googled her and some of the stuff looks quite interesting. I'm looking forward to looking into them.

Quinn: Yeah. So we're going to get mostly into her actual art at the end of the episode, but I want to talk about her biography first because she really did have a fascinating life. She was born in Florida in 1892 as the seventh out of 14 children.

Betty: Wow.

Quinn: Yes. So very big family. Sadly not a very well off family had a lot of struggles, not least of which was that she started making art as a young child, she would sculpt little animal figures out of the natural clay that was just around her. But her father, who was a Methodist minister, strongly disapproved of this, viewed it as sinful and very sadly basically tried to beat it out of her, which she spoke about later in life. Luckily when she reached into high school, her high school principal really encouraged her work and even let her teach a class about clay modeling, which really fostered her lifelong love for both making art and for teaching it.

Betty: I mean, I certainly have experienced parents not encouraging children to get into art because they think it's, you know, useless. But you know, I'm glad at least I wasn't, you know, it wasn't so bad that I got art beaten out of me. 

Quinn: Yeah. Really not a good situation. Definitely had a very complicated relationship with her family in many different ways. Very interestingly, she also married three times before the age of 30. These mostly ended in tragedy, which is quite horrible. She married for the first time in 1907 at the age of 15. She had her only child, a daughter Irene Connie Moore one year later, and then her husband John Moore died not long after that.

Betty: That’s tough.

Quinn: I know, it's very tough. And then 1915, so around like six or seven years after this point, she had moved to West Palm Beach and then she met and married James Savage, whose last name that she took and kept even after they divorced about like five or six years after that. And then in 1923, a few years after she moved to New York, which we'll get to in a second, she married Lincoln Posten, who very sadly only a year later died of pneumonia when he was a board of ship returning from Liberia. Cause he was part of a delegation connected with the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League Delegation. So he was off doing this work and on the way back, unfortunately got ill and died. And so by 1924, which again is only—she was only 32 at this point. She had been married three times and widowed twice.

Betty: Wow. So she's basically the same age as me right now, but I have not been married any times and no one has died—that I've been married to, cause I haven't married anyone, but anyway yeah, that seems like it's quite difficult. I can't imagine what that's like.

Quinn: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, I think, she did not marry again. And I don't know if she had more serious relationships in her life. These are not sort of indicated in her biography, but I can understand why maybe at that point you say, okay, I am not interested in doing this again. I would get that. So beyond the unfortunately mostly extremely tragic relationship she had with like every man in her life, she had a super interesting career. Meanwhile on our art side, she actually started achieving certain amounts of success relatively early. In 1919 when she was still in Florida she was granted a booth at the Palm Beach County Fair, and she won a $25 prize for the most original exhibit, which obviously was more money back then. And so she was achieving small success in Florida, but there just really wasn't a big enough market and community there for her. And so she moved to New York in 1921. This really is a wonderful time for her to be going to New York. This is, you know, at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. And so there is absolutely a vibrant community that she is just prime to be a part of in New York. She arrives there. She, unfortunately, she cannot afford tuition at the School of American Sculpture that she was interested in attending. But she instead went to Cooper Union, which was a scholarship based school. And she was selected before 142 men that were left on the waiting list.

Betty: Nice.

Quinn: She even was, she even won an additional scholarship and funding for room and board because her work was so impressive to the advisory council.

Betty: That's great. Yeah. I mean, I certainly hope that's a little bit more than $25.

Quinn: And then she completed the four year degree in three years. So she's arrived in New York. She is young. She is already sort of a rising star sculptor and is really showing her talent and her ability quite quickly. Unfortunately in these areas where you know, she can't go to the, you know, lofty, capital letters, School of American Sculpture—you know, just based on the name alone, I'm like, wow, the flagship school of American Sculpture. And so she ends up at a school that is, perhaps doesn't afford her the same kind of networking connections that she would've been able to get in somewhere else, you know? So even from this beginning, it's like a very clear double trajectory of she's doing really well, and she's clearly very successful, but she's perhaps not reaping the rewards that she should be reaping from the level of talent that she's demonstrating. That being said, she did still do some really amazing recognized work. She was commissioned by the New York Public Library on West 135th to do a bust of W.E.B. Du Bois. And she did so well at this they were like, oh my God, this is amazing. So she got a bunch of other commissions. Including a bust of Marcus Garvey and a bust of a William Pickens Sr. which was especially celebrated for, and I quote, “depicting an African-American in a more humane, neutral way as opposed to the stereotypes as of the time,” as did many of her works.

Betty: Wow. So are some of these sculptures still in New York that is available to be seen?

Quinn: There is some that is still out there and can be seen. For example, one of her most famous works, which was a titled Gamin, which we'll talk about in more detailed a little bit, that's on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And so these, some of these more like commissioned works were. Unfortunately, a lot of her work actually did not hold up so well because she worked almost exclusively in clay or plaster because she couldn't afford bronze. And so for example, another one of her most famous works was Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as The Harp, which was created for the 1939 New York World's Fair. And because she did not have the money to have it cast in bronze or like stored correctly after the World's Fair, it was destroyed at the close of the fair. And so we only have pictures of it.

Betty: That sucks. This looks really cool. Like, it looks like a harp, but it looks like it's a bunch of people who have different heights or standing on some sort of hill—the picture is really small. And then there's someone who looks like they're like kneeling or squatting in front of it.

Quinn: Yeah. So, we'll get to that in a little bit, because that becomes—that's still 15 years out from where we are in her life at this point. But we're about to hit one of the biggest markers and kind of turning points for her, which was in 1923, she applied for a summer art program at the Fountainebleau School of Fine Arts in France. And she was accepted, but then they found out she was Black and they rescinded the acceptance offer because they thought, oh, well, we think our white students aren't going to be comfortable working alongside a Black woman. So actually you can’t come.

Betty: Oh my God. I mean, unfortunately, I'm not surprised. 

Quinn: Yeah. It's like, obviously for the time period it's not a surprising thing to happen. Still atrocious. And she said so. She was very, she actually was very public about this and created sort of a very public international fight for equal placement in this program. She wrote a letter to the New York World and this ended up getting pretty wide press coverage. Unfortunately they did not overturn their decision, although I don't even know if she would have wanted to still go there after all of this, but they didn't overturn their decision. But one of the members of the committee who was swayed by her was Herman Atkins McNeil. And he personally invited her to come and study with him. And so he became one of her personal teachers.

Betty: At least there was some progress. One person was like yeah, that was not a good decision.

Quinn: Yeah. The bar is in hell. [laughs] Meanwhile a few years later she won the Otto Kahn Prize in 1928 with her submission Head of a Negro. But even as she won this award, she was extremely critical of the Harman Foundation for what, which she considered the fetishization of like this “primitive” aesthetic. And she was really critical of the Harman Foundation and the director of the Harman Foundation, Mary Beattie Brady for the quote unquote "low standards for Black art and her lack of understanding in the area of visual arts in general,” which is such a one-two punch it's like, cause she's like on one hand you are bad at this because like, this is bad representation and you have a low standard for this work and you should have higher standards and you should have more respect. And on the other hand also, you're bad at this in general and you don't know anything.

Betty: I love the in general, it’s like you just in general, just everything across the board, you have no idea.

Quinn: Both of these are problems, but I want to be clear. It's two problems, not just one. At the end of the 20s, she was awarded several fellowships and sort of sponsorships from different places that she all used together in order to study in Paris which was a really big deal. She was able to actually, this time actually go to Paris and study, she had works accepted for salon. She won awards and she even received a Carnegie Foundation Grant to travel around France, Belgium and Germany for eight months going to museums, studying different styles of sculpture. And just overall, honestly, that sounds so amazing.

Betty: That is quite, that does sound like quite the adventure. I’m glad, you know, yeah, eventually somebody recognized that she was talented.

Quinn: Yeah. Well, you say that, but apparently while she was there, she wrote that this is a direct quote from her: “the masters are not in sympathy as they all have their own definite ideas and usually wish their peoples to follow their particular method.” and then started mostly just doing work on her own and self studying.

Betty: I do hear that sentiment a lot from, I guess like a lot of, a lot of artists in general, because it just seems like studying art is one of these things where if you want to be really creative and really do your own thing, but then when you have a teacher who wants you to do it their way, like, it seems like so many people, so many people who have like this, you know, like a lot of originality are just like, never mind. I can do my own thing.

Quinn: So after a couple of years of study in Europe, she returned to the United States in 1931. Unfortunately you may be aware that that is during the Great Depression. So perhaps not a great time to be an artist. It wasn't immediately terrible for her. She still had a good amount of success in the 30s, especially relative to it being the Great Depression. In 1934, she was the first African-American artist to be elected onto the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. So that is quite amazing. She launched the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, which coming back to remember I said at the beginning that she is really well known and remembered for being a teacher as well? So this is a huge part of it. She had this studio that was open to anyone and ended up mentoring a lot of artists who went on to have very successful careers and prominence. Some names include Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Gwendolyn Knight. And this is just really interesting fun fact I came across, one of her students was Kenneth B. Clark ,who was a sociologist who did research that ended up contributing to the Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education. So she was mentoring a student who would later go on to have research contribute to the end of school segregation—or at least, the end to legal school segregation.

Betty: Well that is pretty impressive. Do we know, did she teach Kenneth B. Clark like art or was it civil rights related things?

Quinn: Oh no, it was, it was an art school. And so she was doing, I assume that she was personally mostly teaching sculpture, but it was also painting and drawing there. And so this was, this was explicitly like an art studio where anyone could come and study. A couple of years later in 1937, she became the director of the Harlem Community Art Center, which serviced a lot of people and had a very large staff, which was working with all sorts of people from around Harlem and around New York City. Unfortunately, even here, she faced people who didn't want her to be doing what she was doing. Like it was partially funded by the Works Progress Administration. And then the people at WPA were like, hmm, we don't like the fact that she has a leadership role here.  Because even though this woman has done nothing but be successful, people are still mad at her for being a Black woman in any position of power. And this is around the time that she was chosen and commissioned to be in the World's Fair that we were just talking about, again in 1939. So that was definitely a landmark moment of her career, despite the fact that she very sadly was not able to preserve that work. Which I think just says so much, you know, she's commissioned to do this work and then they don't fund the preservation of it.

Betty: Yeah. I mean, I still find it baffling that like, it's been so many years of her being so successful at this point, but still she's like, she still can't get a commission that gives her enough money to cast this into a permanent sculpture.

Quinn: I know, I think that alone says so much. And unfortunately this is where things kind of take a downturn. I mean, obviously it's been rough going the whole time in a lot of ways, but after this point, I mean, the Harlem Community Arts Center is closed when federal funds are shut off due to World War II. She tries to create another art center in Harlem, she founds a gallery. And she did have some amount of success with these. Like she like opened, she held a one woman show and it was well reviewed and everything, but it didn't make enough money to really continue her career. And so a few years later she ended up moving to a farmhouse in New York State, outside the city. And ended up, it sounds like actually cultivating a really beautiful life there. She had friends and family come from New York to her new, rural farm life. She, you know, had her own little farm. And then interestingly enough, a corporation called KB Products Corporation, which was the world's largest production of mushrooms, ended up employing her as a laboratory assistant in the company's cancer research facility. She learned to drive for the first time to commute to and from this job. And even the director of the laboratory ended up providing her with art supplies so that she could continue producing art on the side, which she did alongside of continuing to teach art to children in summer camps. 

Betty: I'm glad this wasn't like, “and she couldn't afford to continue living her life because she's a starving artist.” I'm glad it didn't go that way.

Quinn: Yeah. I mean, obviously there's so much that was unfair about her life and considering the amount of talent that she clearly had and the amount of recognition that she was given every time that she had the chance to prove herself, she should have been able to have a lifelong career as an artist. But when that wasn't in the cards for her because of so many factors in the world around her, the fact that she was able to just create this new, rural life, where she also seemed just like was fulfilled in her career and was still able to continue like making art and teaching art is a really beautiful, it's a really beautiful life pivot. Unfortunately, she did die of cancer at age 70. So not exactly dying young, but definitely could have had many more years of creating art in her farmhouse. And at that point she was pretty obscure even after her success earlier in her life, she wasn't a super well-known figure. But especially as her former mentees expanded their careers and more was documented about her and remembered about her. Today she is remembered as a very important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and in just American art history in general.

Betty: Yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, it seems like not only was she like talented and successful, like she was quite dedicated in teaching or mentoring other artists. So it's like in a way, the impact she had is more than just like the art she created. It's also the people and their art that they created. 

Quinn: Yeah. She has a whole legacy, really probably has spread out to so many different people in so many different places in especially New York, but also probably different places across the world are impacted by her work in one way or another just through this lineage of what she was physically making, but also who she was interacting with and who she was influencing. Now to finish today's episode, let’s take a look at some of this work we've been discussing. So we're going to look at two pieces. The first one is the Gamin bust. This is one of her most famous works. It's what I mentioned before is at the, at permanent display at the Smithsonian. Would you like to just describe, first of all, what you see here? 

Betty: It looks like a bust. It looks like it's bronze or at least some sort of metal. It looks like it's a, I want to say it's maybe a teenage boy, or maybe even younger. And the boy is wearing a hat and has a collared shirt and seems to have, I would say like a pretty neutral expression on his face. The sculpture… I dunno, I want to say it seems really—I feel like smooth is probably not the right word, but it's just got a lot of like smooth shapes.

Quinn: Yeah. So this is a bust of her nephew who modeled for this in 1929 at a point when he and his family were living with Augusta Savage in Harlem. A lot of her family at different points lived with her in New York as they faced various struggles back home in Florida. But yes, so he modeled for this. This is actually plaster, it's painted plaster. And the name of it comes from the French word for, like, the street children. So it's invoking this idea of this working boy and this is one of her most successful pieces, remains one of her most famous pieces. At the time that it was first exhibited, it was voted most popular in an exhibition that had over 200 works in it. And so it definitely struck a chord with people. There's something about it that as you said, it's quite smooth. There's nothing that feels particularly elaborate or over the top about the style, but it is, it’s realistic, it’s sensitive in a way—if I can describe a sculpture as sensitive, but he just really looks like a little boy. He looks like he has thoughts going on in his head. He looks like a real person who's been captured here in this plaster. 

Betty: Yeah, no, you know what? You're right. I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier about her actually creating people who seem like normal, like real people rather than characters or stereotypes. And I think, I think like, yeah, I can't really put my finger on exactly why, but I see that and—oh, fluid was the word I was looking for, in terms of like the shape, but again, like you said, it's just seems like a normal relatable person. And I think, you know, I'm not a sculptor in any way. And this, like any type of realistic sculpture seems like just totally, very difficult to do. But I think being able to capture the realness of a person in three dimension that does not seem like a very easy thing to do. 

Quinn: No. I also like how this bust from certain angles, he looks just kind of very thoughtful. And from certain angles, he kind of looks like he’s side eyeing you.

Betty: Yeah, that's true.

Quinn: It’s almost like his, the meaning of his expression can change depending on what angle that you're looking at it, which I think is a very fun aspect to a sculpture, which is of course three-dimensional and meant to be interacted with in person. And yes, this is only a piece that is in painted plaster like most of her work. But luckily unlike a lot of her work that was only made in plaster or clay, this has been beautifully preserved and remains on display. So if you're in DC, anybody out there, you can go see this. Now in contrast to that, we're going to take a closer look at the Lift Every Voice and Sing piece that we mentioned earlier. So you spoke a little bit about this before, but do you want to say anything else about the visual description of this?

Betty: Oh yeah, sure. I think the link you sent me is a slightly larger picture than what I saw earlier. So I can see now that… what looks like a row of people. They're standing on this hand or an arm that looks to be carrying them, which kind of now makes sense why the, the title is Lift Every Voice and Sing. Cause it looks like the hand is lifting up all these people. And then they seem to be African-American figures from this picture, although it is quite small. And then, yeah, there’s another figure that is like squatting, kneeling in the front.

Quinn: Yes. So this is based on the song of the same name, Lift Every Voice and Sing which is by James Walden and Rosamund Johnson. And it's actually 16 feet tall, which it's not, it's not quite clear how big this is, but this is quite a large sculpture as well. And it was, again, one of the most popular pieces at the entire World's Fair, especially in terms of the contemporary art that was there. They had like little metal souvenir versions of this which you could buy, you could get postcards of it. And apparently these are tremendously popular. So there are little versions of like the little metal recreations that people bought. Like there are still some of those out there as just a little version of it, but yeah, unfortunately the original work was just destroyed at the end of it because it was so large and cost-prohibitive to transport or preserve in any way. And because we can't have nice things no one else funded this, or frankly, you know, paid this woman enough in her career to allow her to fund it at herself. And so it was lost to time. So we just have this photograph of it and, you know, and mementos that are left of this work, which no pun intended struck a chord with people at the time.

Betty: Yeah. It does seem like a lot of her work are about people and about representing them in real life and you know, their connections and the community. And it does seem like it carries through, you know, in her life. And like you mentioned, she was, you know, a leader in all these communities and schools and it really does seem like, I can kind of see like why she would be popular because she really highlighted the lives of people. And I think, you know, that's people like telling stories and, and being, you know, seen. I can see how, why her works are very important to people. It's again, it's unfortunate that a lot of them did not survive.

Quinn: Yeah. I mean, especially this one, I mean, this song is so historically important, even in the decades after this, after this sculpture was made, became even more important during the Civil Rights Movement and all of that. And so it would have been so amazing to have this preserved in some way, but unfortunately we just have, we just have the memories and the pictures—the memories, like I was there. [laughs]

Betty: Oh yeah. Well maybe it might be interesting to come across one of the little small mini versions, I guess.

Quinn: Yeah. Maybe they're out there. I don't know if there are any in museums or anything, or if just they’re kind of one of those things that are floating around. Maybe you'll find some in a yard sale someday.

Betty: Yeah. I mean, you never know somebody who is grandma who attended the world's fair. Just has it in their drawer. 

Quinn: You never know. Well, this has going to look at the life and work of Augusta Savage, a woman with a pretty mixed bag of great work and great talent have faced up against a lot of things that she did not deserve to have to deal with, but still made beautiful work in response to that. 

Betty: Well, that's great. Thank you for introducing me to her. I'm glad I now know about her.

Quinn: Well, thank you so much for hanging out with me. And thanks everybody out there for listening. You can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial, and you can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. You can also find me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. And I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations, and speaking of YouTube, we also have a YouTube channel for Pictorial Podcast where you can look at the video version of our podcasts a few weeks after the audio version has been released. So for this one, you will be looking at some amazing works by Augusta Savage.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!