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The Harp: Augusta Savage's lost masterpiece
The Harp: Augusta Savage's lost masterpiece
In 1939, First Coast-born artist Augusta Savage debuted her masterwork: a monumental sculpture inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s hymn 'Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.' Just a year later, it was demolished. This is the story of the short life and long legacy of a work of art with deep Jacksonville roots: The Harp.
Augusta Savage learned both art and adversity at a very early age. As a child growing up in Green Cove Springs, Florida in the 1890s, she taught herself to sculpt using the red clay of the local brickyard. “From the time I can first recall the rain falling on the red clay in Florida, I wanted to make things,” she said. “When my brothers and sisters were making mud pies, I would be making ducks and chickens with the mud.” However, Savage’s father, a farmer and Methodist minister, considered her clay figures sinful “graven images.” “My father licked me four or five times a week, and almost whipped all the art out of me,” she said.
The art never did leave Savage, but the tension between her irrepressible urge to create and external pressures that repeatedly conspired against her artistic growth would echo through the rest of her life. In 1939, Savage put her experience with repression and resilience to use in her most remarkable work: the lost 16 foot masterpiece known as “The Harp,” or as she evidently preferred, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Eight decades after it was destroyed, the Harp is still inspiring new generations of artists and advocates. Undoubtedly Savage, creator and teacher, would find this a fitting tribute. As she said in 1935, “I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work. No one could ask for more than that.”
In 1939, First Coast-born artist Augusta Savage debuted her masterwork: a monumental sculpture inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s hymn 'Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.' Just a year later, it was demolished. This is the story of the short life and long legacy of a work of art with deep Jacksonville roots: The Harp.
Augusta Savage learned both art and adversity at a very early age. As a child growing up in Green Cove Springs, Florida in the 1890s, she taught herself to sculpt using the red clay of the local brickyard. “From the time I can first recall the rain falling on the red clay in Florida, I wanted to make things,” she said. “When my brothers and sisters were making mud pies, I would be making ducks and chickens with the mud.” However, Savage’s father, a farmer and Methodist minister, considered her clay figures sinful “graven images.” “My father licked me four or five times a week, and almost whipped all the art out of me,” she said.
The art never did leave Savage, but the tension between her irrepressible urge to create and external pressures that repeatedly conspired against her artistic growth would echo through the rest of her life. In 1939, Savage put her experience with repression and resilience to use in her most remarkable work: the lost 16 foot masterpiece known as “The Harp,” or as she evidently preferred, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Eight decades after it was destroyed, the Harp is still inspiring new generations of artists and advocates. Undoubtedly Savage, creator and teacher, would find this a fitting tribute. As she said in 1935, “I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work. No one could ask for more than that.”
https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/the-harp-augusta-savages-lost-masterpiece/
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