Gamin

Gamin is a tabletop bust of a child, carefully molded to highlight the child’s open, inquisitive face. His clothes—a creased shirt and a soft newsboy’s cap—are rumpled, suggesting the active life of a playful young boy. The model was likely Savage’s nephew Ellis Ford, whose family had moved to Harlem in New York City, where Augusta Savage lived and worked, after a hurricane destroyed their home in Florida. The word “GAMIN” is etched near the bottom, below the row of buttons that reach up to the boy’s shirt collar; in French, gamin is an informal term for a male “child” and in English held connotations of a “street urchin.” The sculpture is modeled in plaster and has been painted to mimic bronze; Savage made multiple copies of this work in plaster, based on a life-sized bronze cast in 1929.

The original bronze Gamin changed Savage’s life and career. In 1929, she won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for Gamin, which supported a year of study in Paris. She enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and exhibited her work in the Salon d’Automne and at the Grand Palais. She won a second Rosenwald Fellowship in 1931 which allowed her to extend her time in Paris, after which she traveled throughout France and to Belgium and Germany, before returning to Harlem in 1932.

As a professional sculptor in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, Savage became known for her portrait busts of influential figures like W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, as well as her considerate, empathetic portraits of children, including Portrait of a Baby (TF TCA2023.1) and Gamin. During her career as a sculptor, she also worked as an arts educator, opening the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in 1932, where she taught artists including Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence (1913–2005), and Norman Lewis (1909–1979). In 1934 she became the director of the Harlem Community Art Center, a Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project that served as a model for similar centers around the United States during the Great Depression.

 

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Kahn, Eve. "An Artist's Retreat from a Harlem Harasser." The New York Times,  March 25, 2016. Ill. p. C23 (color). Perree, Rob, and Sue McDonnell. Tell Me Your Story: 100 Years of Storytelling in African American Art. (exh. cat., Kunsthal KAde). Amersfoort, The Netherlands: Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoort, 2020. Ill. p. 31 (color).

Geuze, Sophia. "Buste van pleisterwerk en schoensmeer." Nederlands Dagblad, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, February 21, 2020. Ill. p. 6 (color).