Green Cove Springs to honor native daughter, artist Augusta Savage with historical marker

Officials will unveil a historic marker Thursday in Green Cove Springs to honor sculptor and educator Augusta Savage, who grew up in Clay County and sold property for the city's first Black high school.

Savage was born Augusta Christine Fells in Green Cove Springs in 1892, the seventh of 14 children in the family. She moved to New York in the 1920s and, following several years of study in Paris, opened the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem in 1932. Her best-known work, "The Harp," was inspired by "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," the song written by Jacksonville brothers James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson. Her sculpture, 16 feet tall and made of plaster painted to look like rock, was prominently displayed at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, but was destroyed when the fair closed. A mural based on "The Harp" can be seen on a building in downtown Jacksonville, across from James Weldon Johnson Park.

The marker will be at 1105 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Green Cove Springs, adjacent to the Augusta Savage Arts & Community Center. The center, with soccer and baseball fields, a gym, a community park and a museum, is housed on the former Dunbar High School campus. The Savage family homestead was on that site, and records show Augusta Savage sold the five-acre property for $500 in 1944 to be the site of Green Cove Springs' only Black high school. Dunbar closed in 1967, when Clay County schools were integrated.

It will be unveiled during a ceremony scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

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Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director and CEO at Jacksonville's Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, said the museum has two of Savage's works in its permanent collection. "Gamin" and "The Diving Boy" are original pieces that are on display every day at the Cummer.

Brownlee, who joined the Cummer in 2020, first visited the museum in 2018 during a showing of Savage's work. She said there aren't very many pieces of Savage's work out there, because most were never cast in bronze.

"She did not receive the just desserts during her lifetime," Brownlee said. "She should have received far more."

Brownlee said Savage was a key figure during the "Harlem Renaissance," a period in the 1920s and '30s when Black painters, sculptors, dancers and were becoming more accepted around the world. "It became an international movement where Black creativity was front and center. There’s no question that Harlem was the epicenter of all of it."

Education was Savage's true passion, Brownlee said. Painters Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis were among the prominent artists that learned their craft in Savage's school. "She was such an incredible professor, teacher, influencer."

She said she is delighted to see Savage finally getting her due in her hometown.

"We’re excited about it because we know what she did," Brownlee said. "It is an extraordinary deal that she is going to be acknowledged with this historical marker. "

Savage, who died in 1962, spent much of her career teaching and valued education more than art. “If I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work" she said in an interview. "No one could ask for more than that.”

Green Cove Springs officials won't say in advance what's on the historic marker, but noted that they had a difficult time fitting everything they wanted to say within the allotted 1,235 characters.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Green Cove Springs to honor artist Augusta Savage with historic marker