Remembering Augusta Savage, The Only Black Woman Commissioned To Create Art For The 1939 World's Fair

In 1921, Florida native Augusta Savage arrived in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Upon her arrival she applied to and was accepted into Cooper Union. Displaying advanced talent, by 1923 she had completed her BFA in three years. And about 16 years later, her work was on display at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens.

Savage — also known for being a gallerist, art teacher and activist — was one of the earliest American artists to celebrate Black physiognomy in her sculpture. In 1929, She created a portrait bust of her nephew entitled GAMIN which won her a Rosenwald Fellowship and Guggenheim Award to study in Europe for 3 years.

When she returned to Harlem she was eager to share what she learned and opened and managed several art schools, one of them located in the basement of the 135th Street Branch library, today known as The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

In the late 1930s Savage was appointed the first Director of the Harlem Community Art Center, a school so well run that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited and used it as a model for all Federal Art Program schools nationally. In 1939, she opened the first ever commercially Black-owned and operated art gallery in the United States representing artists Meta Warrick Fuller, Beauford Delaney, and Lois Mailou Jones to name a few. As she rose in stature, she encouraged and took her students along with her, training them and then later hiring them as instructors. Some of her most famous students are painters Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith and sculptor Selma Burke.

Savage was the first Black woman elected to the National Association of Women Artists, and went on to become the only Black woman commissioned to create a work of art for the 1939 World’s Fair.

At the Fair, the Board of Design commissioned Savage to create a work that would highlight the contributions that Black people made to the field of music. The sculpture she created for the event was her most recognizable and famous work, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." (Later changed by Fair officials to "The Harp.")

The title of the piece was taken from the Black National Anthem, a poem written by lawyer, activist and songwriter James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother musician, J. Rosamond Johnson. The 16-foot plaster sculpture was in the form of a harp, with robed human figures as the harp strings and at the front a male holding a scroll that read, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

Tragically, at the end of the Fair the work was demolished, along with many other exhibits.

That was Savage's crowning artistic achievement. After 1940, she rarely exhibited, and said her legacy was her students. What remains of her popular work are souvenir pieces. Today the Schomburg Center houses the largest collection of work by Augusta Savage in a public institution.

As part of our month-long Dear NYC series, we're looking at New York City gems hidden away at the New York Public Library. The NYPL’s four research centers offer the public access to over 55 million items, including rare books, manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, prints, maps, ephemera, and more. Integral to these robust collections is the Library’s extensive material related to New York City, and as NY works to come together, cope, heal and recover from the 2020 pandemic, economic uncertainty, and the many issues that divide us, it is important to look at that history and remember: New York is resilient. New York is strong. New York has seen its share of hard times. And, as always, with Patience and Fortitude (the names given to the Library’s beloved lions in 1933 by Mayor LaGuardia for the virtues New Yorkers needed to get through the Great Depression) we will get through it, together.