Film Screening: Searching for Augusta Savage

Searching for Augusta Savage

Sculptor Augusta Savage was one of the leading influencers of the Harlem Renaissance. She opened the first gallery in the U.S. dedicated to exhibiting Black art in 1939. Called a "race woman" and “Sculptress of the Negro People,” she was also among the first artists of her time period to center Black life and the Black body in her work. It was in fact because of her anti-racist activism and association with the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and other progressive causes that Savage was investigated by the FBI. She also founded organizations that provided free art education and training to over 2,500 people, and mentored and advocated for jobs for a generation venerated artists, including Romare Bearden, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Selma Burke, Norman Lewis, and Kenneth B. Clark. Savage was also the only Black artist and one of four women commissioned to create an exhibit for the 1939 World’s Fair. Augusta Savage created a 16-foot sculpture depicting a choir of 12 Black children singing, that was inspired by the lyrics of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” that was the most visited and photographed exhibit at the Fair. Yet this monument to Black culture and the promise of Black youth did not survive the test of time. The 23-minute biopic, Searching for Augusta Savage, investigates why nearly half of the approximately 160 works of art Savage created, including “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” have been lost or destroyed, and why evidence of her accomplishments appear to have been erased.

About Sandra Rattley

Sandra Rattley has over 40 years experience leading and launching multimedia projects. She was executive producer, director and writer of Searching for Augusta Savage, a 23-minute documentary about the prolific sculptor, who was one of the most influential contributors to the Harlem Renaissance and leading artist in the U.S., the lead film for a new PBS series, “American Masters Shorts.” Rattley was also executive producer, director and writer for Unladylike2020, an animated documentary series about unsung women who changed America over a hundred years ago, which premiered on PBS’s biography series American Masters timed to the centennial of women’s suffrage and has attracted over 6 million viewers. With Charlotte Mangin, she is co-founder of Audacious Women Productions.

She was senior story editor of the Spotify podcast series The Sum of Us, hosted by author Heather McGee. Rattley was also executive producer of seminal documentary projects including the Peabody Award winning series Wade in the Water about African American sacred music, produced by NPR and the Smithsonian Institution, and Making the Music, hosted by Wynton Marsalis, produced for NPR and PBS. Rattley served as executive producer for TV and video at the non-profit journalism organization Futuro Media, where she launched the PBS series America By The Numbers, covering underreported stories about America’s changing demographics, and NBCNews.com’s Humanizing America, profiling the diversity of the American electorate. Rattley is the former VP for Cultural Programming at NPR where she launched the weekly show, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, as well as NPR’s office of civic engagement. She serves as creative consultant for Black Public Media’s 360 Incubator, a mentorship program for African American media makers. Rattley also founded, launched and

produced the Africa Learning Channel, a Pan-African news and information service, streaming via WorldSpace satellite to over 100 million listeners in 51 African countries.

About Dr. Eleanor W. Traylor

Eleanor W. Traylor, Sterling Brown Professor of English, Emerita (retired in 2014), and former Chairman of the Department of English in in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University (1993-2009), is an acclaimed scholar and critic in African-American literature and criticism. Dr. Traylor earned a B.A. at Spelman College; an M.A. at Atlanta University; and a Ph.D. at Catholic University, from which she later received an Alumni Achievement Award in Literary Criticism. On a Merrill Scholarship, Dr. Traylor studied at the Stuttgarter Hochschule in West Germany, and subsequently as a research fellow in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. More recently, Dr. Traylor has traveled to South Africa, Paris, Brazil, Jamaica, Martinique, Jerusalem, Switzerland, Germany, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands to address scholarly forums. Perhaps, Dr. Traylor’s signature contribution to scholarship is the renaming of an African American literary tradition from “slave narrative” to “emancipatory narrative” in her critique of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “Naming the UnNamed: African American Criticism and African American Letters” (1993). Her work has appeared in the form of chapter essays, biographies, articles, and papers. Among the texts that she has produced are Broad Sympathy: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader (1996), The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Tradition (1988), The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production (1968), College Reading Skills (1966), and biographical and cultural scripts for the Smithsonian Institution’s Program in Black American Culture. Her recent scholarship, “The Protocols of Wonder in the Enunciatory Narrative of Maya Angelou,” was published in the College Language Association Journal (2014), and she is currently working on a collection of her essays, The Provenance of Wonder.

About Amber Robles-Gordon

Amber Robles-Gordon is an interdisciplinary visual artist of Puerto Rican and Caribbean descent who resides in Washington, DC. Her creations are visual representations of her hybridism: a fusion of her gender, ethnicity, cultural, political and social experiences and concerns.  The underpinnings of her creations are imbued to reveal racial injustice and the paradoxes within the imbalance of masculine and feminine energies within our society. Known for recontextualizing non-traditional materials, her large scale assemblages, sculptures, collages, installations, and public artwork, in order to emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life. Robles-Gordon is driven by the need to construct her own distinctive path, innovate, peel back the layers of injustice and challenge social norms, hence her artwork is unconventional and non-formulaic. Robles-Gordon is an advocate with over fifteen years of exhibiting her artwork, as an  art educator, and coordinating exhibitions. She received a Bachelor of Science, Business Administration in 2005 at Trinity University, and subsequently  she completed her Master’s in Fine Arts (Painting) in 2011 from Howard University. Her artwork has been reviewed/featured in national media and art publications. Robles-Gordon, has been awarded artist and artist teaching residencies and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. She has been commissioned by art museums, galleries, art centers, universities/colleges, radio and television stations to teach workshops, lecture, and create temporary/permanent public art installations for art fairs, agencies, and institutions.

About Positive Productions Inc.

Positive Productions, Inc. (PPI) is a 501(3)c non-profit organization whose mandate is the perpetuation of Black independent voices through the ever-dynamic art of filmmaking. PPI acts as an on-going link between the independent Black filmmaker and his/her audience through training, exhibitions, and workshops. Our very grass roots involvement focuses on building appreciation for the role of culture in shaping our behavior and our future and the power and responsibility that bestows upon artists. PPI is thereby creating critical audiences while simultaneously developing critical filmmakers. For more information, click here.