Episode Details

At the 1939 New York World's Fair, a 16-foot plaster sculpture shaped like a harp, its strings formed by twelve singing Black children and its sounding board by a giant hand and arm, was one of the fair's defining masterpieces. When the fair closed, its creator could not afford to cast it in bronze or even move it, so wrecking crews smashed it to rubble. This episode explores the life of that sculptor, Augusta Savage, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and asks how an artist builds a legacy when the materials of permanence are denied to her.

Born in Florida in 1892, Savage dug red clay as a child and was beaten by her minister father for making graven images. We follow her to New York with $4.60 to her name, through Cooper Union in three years, a rescinded Fontainebleau scholarship she fought in the press, dignified busts of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, two decades of terror from the stalker Joe Gould, her Harlem basement school that trained Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Gwendolyn Knight, and Kenneth B. Clark, and her quiet final years on a farm in Saugerties before her death in 1962.

• Why a true sculptor could not simply switch to drawing to avoid her father's punishment
• How Savage turned a racist rejection into an international public relations crisis
• The reason her basement art center was a multiplication of ambition, not a retreat
• What the lost-wax process actually costs, and why plaster meant erasure
• Her surviving bust Gamin at the Smithsonian and the modern question of who controls permanence