She Sculpted the Faces History Tried to Skip

Augusta Savage started sculpting as a little girl in Florida, shaping figures out of the red clay in her yard. Her father thought it was sinful and punished her for it. She kept digging up clay.

That stubbornness is the whole story, repeated at larger and larger scale.

By the 1930s Savage was one of the Harlem Renaissance's most respected sculptors, and she spent that respect on other people. She opened a studio in Harlem and taught classes, many free, to anyone serious. A teenager named Jacob Lawrence learned in her orbit; he became one of the most celebrated American painters of the century. Ask where a movement comes from, and the answer is usually somebody's classroom. Harlem's was hers.

For the 1939 New York World's Fair, Savage was commissioned to create a monumental work. She answered with "The Harp": a choir of singing figures rising like the strings of the instrument, inspired by Lift Every Voice and Sing. Fair visitors by the thousands stood in front of it.

“She taught with one hand and made masterpieces with the other, and history owes her for both.”