“My Father Almost Whipped All the Art Out Of Me”
Sculptor Augusta Savage overcame abuse and prejudice to craft a body of work that in large part, was not preserved
I like to think of her as a little girl, bringing handfuls of wet clay up from a riverbank in Green Cove Springs, Florida where she was born Augusta Christine Fells at the end of the 19th century. She made animals and other miniature figures, working out of her imagination and learning the craft she would practice for the rest of her life.
Her adversity started early too. Savage was African-American in the time of Jim Crow. Her father, a Methodist minister, took the Bible’s admonition about graven images seriously and severely punished his daughter for her interests.
My father licked me four or five times a week,” Savage remembered, “and almost whipped all the art out of me.”
Savage’s family was poor. She was the seventh child of fourteen children born to Cornelia and Edward Fells. Savage may have found her art an escape but thwarted in that she found another. At 15, she married John T. Moore and had a daughter, Irene, the next year.
