A month or so ago, I bidded on and won at auction a set of filmstrips from the New York World’s Fair in 1939. There were several small boxes of films with views from the fair, along with one filmstrip inside a cute little burgundy and black Bakelite viewer.
There was something nagging at me about this world’s fair, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I bought the box of items because I love old manual cameras and View masters and reels.
Once I got the box home, I viewed each of the filmstrips. They were a good snapshot of which companies were prevalent back then – GE, Ford Motor Co., U.S. Steel. They also showed some of the sculptures: American womanhood and manhood, Sea Maid by Raymond Barger. And the famous Perisphere.
Then I got to wondering if African Americans were represented in any way in this world’s fair. I had written about W.E.B. DuBois and others mounting an exhibit of African American accomplishments at the Paris Exposition in 1900.
Could something similar have happened in this country in 1939?
So, I searched Google, and there I found the answer to the nagging question in my head:
African American artist Augusta Savage had created her famous sculpture “The Harp” for the fair. That was it! I had come across this information before about Savage.
The piece was not included in any of the 150 views on the filmstrips that I had. I was not surprised, but it would’ve been thrilling if it had been. Photographer Carl Van Vechten photographed the sculpture, which was stationed in the court of the Contemporary Arts building.
Savage was commissioned by the New York World’s Fair to create a piece representing the musical contributions of African Americans. Her sculpture was inspired by the James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson’s song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is considered the Black National Anthem. The 16-foot-tall plaster sculpture showed a series of singers symbolizing the strings on a harp with the base as the arm of God. At one end is a figure holding the first notes of the Johnson song and serving as the foot rest. Here’s a photo of her at work on the sculpture.
The sculpture was made of plaster, and like the other works of arts at the fair, was destroyed when it ended.
Augusta Savage was born in 1892 in Green Coves, Fla. She began forming sculptures as a child but was discouraged by her father. She moved to New York in 1920 and landed smack into the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. She eventually sculpted some noted African Americans, including DuBois and Marcus Garvey.
While attending the Cooper Union School of Art, she applied for a summer program to study in France but was rejected because she was black. She spoke out against the rejection to the local media, and stories were written about it. The committee did not change its mind, though, but I’m sure it made Savage feel a little better.
She sculpted another famous piece “Gamin” – a bust of her nephew with a street-wise look – in 1929. Savage produced it in bronze, and created a series of smaller plaster ones that were painted with a bronze patina. These still pop up from time to time: I saw one on Antiques Roadshow and read about another purchased by the University of Virginia Art Museum. (Photo above is a replica of “The Harp.”)
Savage did finally get to Paris, winning a fellowship based on “Gamin.” Other fellowships allowed her to stay in Europe awhile and travel.
She returned to the United States in the early 1930s, opened her own art school – the Savage Studio of Arts and Craft (one site said she got a grant from the Carnegie Foundation) – and became well known as an art teacher in Harlem. She helped many young African American artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight (Lawrence’s wife) and Norman Lewis, and agitated the Works Progress Administration for them. She also helped form the Harlem Artists Guild and headed the Harlem Community Arts Center, which was funded by the WPA.
In her later years, she did very little art and spent most of her time in Saugerties, NY. Unfortunately, she was mostly forgotten for years. She died in 1962. Now, she is considered one of the premier artists and teachers of the Harlem Renaissance. (Photo at right is “Gamin.”)
Many of her works were in plaster, and she could not raise the money to do them in bronze, so a lot of them are lost. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem did a retrospective of her work in 1988 and, according to the book “Harlem Renaissance Lives,” was able to locate only 19 pieces of her work.
