Augusta Savage: From Green Cove Springs to Harlem

Augusta Savage arrived in New York City in 1921 with $4.60 in her pocket. Within a decade she was one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Harlem Renaissance, and she had learned her first lessons in the red clay of a Florida riverbank.

Shaped by Florida Clay

Augusta Christine Fells was born in Green Cove Springs in 1892, the seventh of fourteen children. The little town on the St. Johns River sat among clay pits, and she shaped animals from that clay as a child, often against the wishes of her father, a minister who disapproved. A local fair awarded her a prize for her figures, and a teacher urged her to try New York. She enrolled at Cooper Union and finished the four-year program in three.

The Harp

For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Savage became the only Black woman commissioned to create a sculpture. She built The Harp, a sixteen-foot work inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” showing twelve Black children as the strings of a harp held in the hand of God. More than five million visitors saw it, and it was among the fair’s most photographed exhibits. Savage could not afford to cast it in bronze or store it, and it was destroyed when the fair closed.

A Teacher Above All

Savage may have given even more as a teacher than as an artist. Running free WPA-funded classes in Harlem, she mentored a generation of Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence, who said he became an artist because she walked him down to sign up for the program. She served as the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. Florida later named her to its Artists Hall of Fame, and Green Cove Springs remembers her with a community center that bears her name.