Augusta Savage(18921962) was an important African American artist and arts educator.

Savage began making art as a child, using the natural clay found in her community. She
liked to sculpt animals and other small figures. But her father, a Methodist minister, didn't
approve of this activity, and did whatever he could to stop her. Savage once said that her
father "almost whipped all the art out of me." Despite her father's objections, Savage
continued to make sculptures. When the family moved to West Palm Beach, Florida in
1915, she encountered a new challenge??a lack of clay. Savage eventually got some
materials from a local potter and created a group of figures that she entered in a local
county fair. Her work was well-received, winning a prize and the support of the fair's
organizer, George Graham Currie. He encouraged her to study art. After a failed attempt to
establish herself as a sculptor in Jacksonville, Florida, Savage moved to New York City in
1920s. She struggled financially throughout her life, but was able to study art at the Cooper
Union, which did not charge tuition. After a year, the school gave her a scholarship to help
with living expenses. Savage excelled there, finishing her course work in three years
instead of the usual four. While at the Cooper Union, she had an experience that would
influence her life and work in 1923. Savage applied to a special summer program to study
art in France, but was rejected because of her race. She took the rejection as a call to action,
and sent letters to the local media about the program selection committee's discriminatory
practices. Savage's story made headlines in many newspapers. Despite her efforts, the
committee refused to change its mind. Although disappointed, Savage found success in
other areas. She started to make a name for herself as portrait sculptor. Her works from this
time include portraits of such leading African Americans as W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus

Garvey. Savage was considered to be one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance,
an African-American literary and artistic movement of the 1920s.

Eventually Savage did get her opportunity to study abroad. Several family crises delayed
her for some time, but she finally got her chance. Savage won a Julius Rosenwald
fellowship in 1929, based in part on her sculpture of her nephew entitled Gamin. Savage
spent time in Paris and found support for her work there. She exhibited at the Grand Palais
and won a second fellowship to continue her studies another year. Another grant allowed
her to travel in Europe.

Savage returned the United States in 1932 while the Great Depression was in full swing.
With portrait commissions hard to come by, she began teaching art and established the
Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. Savage helped many young African-American artists,
including Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. She also lobbied the Works Projects
Administration (WPA) on behalf of African-American artists to help them find work
during this time of financial crisis and helped to found the Harlem Artists' Guild. This led
to a directorial position at the WPA's Harlem Community Center, which offered art
instruction for all kinds of students. Highly regarded as an artist, Savage was commissioned
to create a sculpture for the 1939 New York World's Fair. In 1940, Savage moved out of
the city to live the Catskill Mountains area. She spent more time teaching art than actually
making art at this time. Savage died of cancer on March 26, 1962, in New York City.
Savage is remembered today as a great artist, activist, and arts educator, serving as an
inspiration to the many that she taught, helped, and encouraged.

Edmonia Lewis Biography

Sculptor, Artist (c. 1844c. 1911) The first professional African-American and NativeAmerican sculptor, Edmonia Lewis earned critical praise for work that explored religious and
classical themes. Her first notable commercial success was a bust of Colonel Robert Gould
Shaw. Sales of copies of the bust allowed her to sail to Rome, Italy, where she mastered
working in marble. She quickly achieved success as a sculptor. Hailed as the first professional
African-American and Native-American sculptor, Mary Edmonia Lewis had little training but
overcame numerous obstacles to become a revered and respected artist.

Oberlin was a hot bed for the abolitionist movement, a facet of school life that did not escape
Lewis and would greatly influence her later work. In addition, Lewis's time at the college was
marked by her emergence as a talented drawer. But life at Oberlin came to a violent end when
Lewis was falsely accused of poisoning two white classmates. Captured and beaten by a white
mob, Lewis recovered from the attack and then escaped to Boston, Massachusetts, after the
charges against her were dropped. In Boston, Lewis befriended abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison and sculptor Edward A. Brackett. It was Brackett who taught Lewis sculpture and
helped propel her to set up her own studio. By the early 1860s, her clay and plaster medallions
of Garrison, John Brown and other abolitionist leaders had given her a small measure of
commercial success. In 1864, Lewis created a bust of Colonel Robert Shaw, a Civil War hero
who had died leading the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. This was her most famous
work to date and the money she earned from the sale of copies of the bust allowed her to move
to Rome, Italyhome to a number of expatriate American artists, including several women.

Met with critical acclaim when she showed it at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 and in
Chicago two years later, the two-ton sculpture never returned to Italy with its creator because
Lewis couldn't afford the shipping costs. It was placed in storage and only really rediscovered
several decades after her death.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 December 3, 2000) was an AfricanAmerican poet. The first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims. Her mother
was a former school teacher who had chosen that field because she could not afford to
attend medical school. (Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped
slavery to join Union forces during the American Civil War.) When Brooks was six
weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois during the Great Migration; from then
on, Chicago was her hometown.

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. By the
time she was sixteen, she had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At
seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column
of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many published
while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and
sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse. Her characters were often drawn
from the poor of the inner city. After failing to obtain a position with the Chicago
Defender, Brooks took a series of secretarial jobs. By 1941, Brooks was taking part in
poetry workshops. A particularly influential one was organized by Inez Cunningham
Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary background. The group dynamic of
Stark's workshop, all of whose participants were African American, energized Brooks.
Her poetry began to be taken seriously. In 1943 she received an award for poetry from
the Midwestern Writers' Conference.

Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), published by Harper and
Row, earned instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and

was included as one of the Ten Young Women of the Year in Mademoiselle magazine.
With her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African
American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she also was awarded Poetry magazines
Eunice Tietjens Prize. After President John F. Kennedy invited Brooks to read at a
Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began a second career teaching creative
writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University,
Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, City College of New
York, and the University of WisconsinMadison. In 1967 she attended a writers
conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her blackness. This
rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca (1968), a long poem about a mother
searching for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building. In The Mecca was
nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

On May 1, 1996, Brooks returned to her birthplace of Topeka, Kansas. She was invited as
the keynote speaker for the Third Annual Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council's "Women of
Distinction Banquet and String of Pearls Auction." A ceremony was held in her honor at
a local park at 37th and Topeka Boulevard.

Laura Wheeler Waring

Illustrator, Educator, Painter (18871948) Laura Wheeler Waring was an African-American

teacher and artist who became known for her portraits. Her father was the pastor at a historic
African-American church while her mother was a teacher and amateur artist; Wheeler herself
began drawing and painting at a young age. Bolstered by her parents' encouragement, she left
home in order to pursue her interest in art. In Pennsylvania, Wheeler became a part-time
instructor in art and music at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers (now known as
Cheyney University). She also studied at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts. In 1914, she received a scholarship to continue her art studies in Europe. She managed to
visit museums in England and France, but had to cut her tour short when World War I erupted.
After returning to the United States, Wheeler resumed working at Cheyney, where she would
eventually head the department of art and music. To learn how to best instruct her students in
drawing, she took summer classes at Harvard and Columbia universities. In addition to
teaching, she also traveled overseas again; on one trip, she was able to study at the Acadmie
de la Grande Chaumire in Paris.

Outside of painting, Wheelerwho was a member of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored Peoplecreated illustrations, usually pen-and-ink drawings, for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine, The Crisis, and for
its children's publication, theBrownies' Book, throughout the 1920s. Though she enjoyed
working with African-American activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, her teaching commitments in
Pennsylvania kept her from deeper participation in the Harlem Renaissance.

Wheeler's paintings included landscapes and still lifes, but she is best known for her work in
portraiture, in which she captured both unknown and famous figures. In 1927, the Harmon
Foundationan organization created to acknowledge the achievements of African Americans
in the United Stateshonored her with a gold medal for the portrait Anne Washington Derry
(1926). In the late 1920s, several of Waring's paintings were part of a Harmon Foundation
exhibit that featured the work of African-American artists. She was singled out by the
foundation once more when eight of her portraits were shown in a 1944 exhibit entitled
"Portraits of Outstanding American Citizens of Negro Origin." The well-known figures she
painted for this display included Marian Anderson, Jessie Fauset and James Weldon Johnson.

Clementine Hunter (late December 1886 or early January 1887 January 1, 1988) was
a self-taught African-American folk artist from the Cane River region in Louisiana.
Hunter was the granddaughter of a slave, born just two decades after the American Civil
War. She was born either in late December 1886 or early January 1887, the eldest of
seven children to Creole parents at Hidden Hill Plantation, near Cloutierville in
Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Hunter's given name was originally Clemence, but she
changed it after moving to Melrose Plantation.

At the age of 15, Hunter moved to Melrose Plantation south of Natchitoches. She spent
much of her life picking cotton and only attended school for 10 days, never learning to
read or write. She married Emmanuel Hunter, a woodchopper at Melrose, in 1924. The
two lived and worked at Melrose Plantation for many years. Hunter worked as a field
hand in her early years and as a cook and housekeeper beginning in the late 1920s.
Hunter bore seven children, two stillborn. On the morning before giving birth to one of
her children, she picked 78 pounds of cotton, went home and called for the midwife and
was back picking cotton a few days later. Hunter lived her entire life in rural, northwest
Louisiana, never going more than 100 miles from home.

Hunter was self-taught. Melrose Plantation became a mecca for the arts under the
guidance of its owner, Cammie Henry. Numerous artists and writers visited, including
Lyle Saxon, Roark Bradford, Alexander Woollcott, Rose Franken, Gwen Bristow, and
Richard Avedon. Brushes and discarded tubes of paint left by New Orleans artist Alberta

Kinsey after a 1939 visit to Melrose Plantation, were used by Hunter to "mark a picture"
on a window shade,beginning her career as an artist. Hunter gained support from
numerous individuals associated with Melrose Plantation, including Franois Mignon,
plantation curator,who supplied her with paint and materials, and promoted her widely
and James Register. With Mignon's help, Hunter's paintings were displayed in the local
drugstore, where they were sold for one dollar. In her later years, Hunter co-authored
"Melrose Plantation Cookbook" with Mignon. On the outside of the unpainted cabin
where she lived was a sign that read, "Clementine Hunter, Artist. 25 cents to Look." She
produced between four and five thousand paintings in her lifetime. Hunter has become
one of the most well-known self-taught artists, often referred to as the black Grandma
Moses. Though she became a hugely respected artist and is today considered a folk art
legend, Hunter spent her entire life in (or near) poverty. In the 1940s, she sold her
paintings for as little as a quarter. By the 1970s, she was charging hundreds of dollars for
a painting. By the time of her death, her work was being sold by dealers for thousands of
dollars. She rarely titled her works, but would describe what a painting was about, when
asked for a title.