The lost masterpiece5/10/2023 The Harp stood in the courtyard of the fair’s Contemporary Arts Building, just past one of the entrances, and it proved to be a massive hit, a highlight of the fair. Though the sculpture is conventionally known as the Harp, Savage evidently preferred the title Lift Every Voice and Sing, further tying it to the Johnson brothers’ song. Courtesy of the New York Library’s Paul Gillespie Collection of World’s Fair Materials. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.Īnother view of the Harp. The Harp on display at the 1939 World’s Fair. The instrument’s sounding board was the arm of God, reflecting and inverting the song’s line, “Shadowed beneath Thy hand/May we forever stand.” A kneeling man holding a sheet of music served as the harp’s pedal. The towering 16 foot piece took the form of an enormous harp, with a chorus of singing children representing the strings. The sculpture was a temporary version of plaster, colored black like basalt Savage hoped to raise the money to cast a permanent version in bronze. Johnson himself never saw it completed, as he died in a car accident in 1938. Savage worked on the sculpture for two years, taking a leave from the Harlem Community Art Center to do so. Official World’s Fair postcard of the Harp. Savage and an assistant working on the Harp. As Johnson wrote in his autobiography Along This Way, “the schoolchildren of Jacksonville kept singing the song some of them went off to other schools and kept singing it some became school teachers and taught it to their pupils.” For Savage, teaching the next generation was an even greater calling than being an artist, and the story of the hymn’s spread was an instantiation of her philosophy. The Johnsons had taught the song to a choir of school children in 1900, and it was these students who kept it alive. Second was the role that children played in the hymn’s emergence as a national anthem. This closely reflected Savage’s own lived experience of adversity and persistence. First is the lyrics, which speak to both the hardships Black Americans had faced through their history and to their perseverance in working for a better future. It subsequently spread throughout the country, becoming known as the “Black national anthem.” Several aspects of the song and its history would have resonated with Savage. The Johnson brothers wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday at Jacksonville’s Stanton School on February 12, 1900. For her inspiration, she turned to her old friend from Jacksonville, James Weldon Johnson. Nonetheless Savage took her charge to design a fitting tribute to Black American music to heart. One obvious way is the choice of subjects for the decorative sculpture and murals of the fair buildings and grounds and the selection of artists to execute them.”ĭespite these stated ambitions, Savage was one of only three African Americans and twelve women whom the fair hired as artists. “We are planning to do this in the fair in various ways. “It seemed important to recognize the really worth while and distinctive gifts to our American culture of the different races that have constituted our population,” Fair Corporation president Grover Whalen told The New York Times. The New York World’s Fair hired her to create a sculpture for their 1939 exhibition that would celebrate African Americans’ contributions to music. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.Īlso in 1937, Savage received the commission for the work that became her masterpiece. Whalen, president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation, with a replica of The Harp in 1939.
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