Augusta Savage

The extraordinary story of the trailblazing artist

By Nadja Sayej

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“It’s the first exhibition to look at her career, but also how she struggled through poverty and racism,” says the curator, Wendy NE Ikemoto. “She often didn’t have the funds to cast her sculpture in bronze, or the money to store them. Many were cast in plaster and painted with shoe polish to make it look like bronze.”

Savage, who was born in Florida in 1892, moved to New York on a scholarship to study art at the Cooper Union. In 1923, she won a scholarship to study at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France, but the French government retracted her admission after learning she was black.

A typewritten letter from the admissions committee reads that “it would not be wise to have a colored student … as complications would arise, and the student would suffer most from these complications”.

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