1. Augusta Savage persevered, and the principal of her new high school in West Palm Beach, where her family relocated in 1915, encouraged her talent and allowed her to teach a clay modeling class.
16 Facts About Augusta Savage
1. 2.
In 1907, at the age of 15, Augusta Fells married John T Moore; the two had a daughter, Irene Connie Moore, who was born the following year.
3.
In 1915, after moving to West Palm Beach, she met and married James Augusta Savage; she retained the name Augusta Savage throughout her life, even after the two divorced in the early 1920s.
4.
In 1923, Augusta Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, a protege of Marcus Garvey.
5.
Augusta Savage continued to model clay, and in 1919 was granted a booth at the Palm Beach County Fair where she was awarded a $25 prize and ribbon for most original exhibit.
6.
In 1923, Augusta Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, a protege of Garvey.
7.
In 1929, with the help of pooled resources from the Urban League, Rosenwald Foundation, a Carnegie Foundation grant, and donations from friends and former teachers, Augusta Savage was able to travel to France, at age 37.
8.
Augusta Savage returned to the United States in 1931, energized from her studies and achievements.
9.
Augusta Savage pushed on, and in 1934 became the first African-American artist to be elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
10.
In 1937, Augusta Savage became the director of the Harlem Community Art Center; 1,500 people of all ages and abilities participated in her workshops, learning from her multi-cultural staff, and showing work around New York City.
11.
Augusta Savage was one of four women and only two African Americans to receive a professional commission from the Board of Design to be included in the 1939 New York World's Fair.
12.
Deeply depressed by her financial struggle, Augusta Savage moved to a farmhouse in Saugerties, New York, in 1945.
13.
Herman K Knaust, director of the laboratory, encouraged Savage to pursue her artistic career and provided her with art supplies.
14.
Augusta Savage moved in with her daughter, Irene, in New York City when her health started to decline, she later died of cancer on March 26,1962.
15.
In 1923, at a poetry reading in Harlem, Augusta Savage met the Greenwich Village writer Joe Gould.
16.
Mitchell never reported any of this, but New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, drawing from evidence in the Millen Brand Papers at Columbia and the Joseph Mitchell papers, then newly deposited at the New York Public Library, told the story in a 2016 book called Joe Gould's Teeth in which she speculated that Augusta Savage left New York in 1945 to escape Gould.