Sculpture Studio: October 2023

Friday, October 6, 2023

Augusta Savage, b. 1892 Green Cove Springs, Florida, USA, d. 1962

Augusta Savage, Gamin, ca. 1929, painted plaster, 9 x 5 3⁄4 x 4 3⁄8 in. (22.9 x 14.7 x 11.2 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum

Augusta Savage's young nephew Ellis Ford modeled for this sculpture in 1929 while he and his family were living with her in Harlem, taking refuge there after losing their home in Florida in a hurricane. Ellis is shown with the soft cap commonly worn by newspaper boys and other working youth. Inscribed on the base is the French word gamin, a term that refers to streetwise children. This composition was widely considered to be Savage's most successful sculpture. It was so popular that the artist produced a life-sized bronze as well as numerous plaster casts like the one shown here, which she painted to look like bronze.

Savage was an activist-educator and key figure working in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. She mentored countless prominent artists and was an outspoken critic of racism embedded in the artworld. She was a cofounder of the Harlem Artists Guild, which secured employment for Black artists, and she helped establish the Harlem Community Art Center. In 1939 she opened the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art, the first gallery in the United States dedicated specially to exhibiting and selling works by African American artists.

Source link:

https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/gamin-21658

Ceramic Cup That You Can't Put Down

Ceramic Students in the Studio

Laura Towne, Student Work, Ceramic Sculpture II

Darwin

Low fire, underglaze and glaze

Approximately 12 inches tall with smaller surrounding ceramic forms.

Charles Darwin is best known for his contribution to the theory of evolution. Most people are unaware of the relationship between Darwin and the Wedgwood family. Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730. He was an artist, entrepreneur, and abolitionist. In 1759 he established the, ultimately very successful, Wedgwood ceramics company. In 1839 Charles Darwin married Josiah’s granddaughter, Emma Wedgwood. The Wedgwood money financed Darwin’s research.

I find this connection between Darwin’s theories and clay production most interesting as several recent scientific articles have discussed the probability of the role of clay in providing a structured environment that allowed for the birth of proteins and ultimately DNA. A couple of these articles include Before Cells, Biochemicals May Have Combined in Clay by author Bill Steele found in the Cornell Chronicles and Clays and the Origin of Life: The Experiments by authors Jacob Teunis Kloprogge and Hyman Hartman found in the journal Life.

My ceramic sculpture was designed to visually marry the scientific work of Charles Darwin with the Wedgwood fortune that financed it. The bust is presented as a piece of Jasperware, a style of ceramics created by Josiah Wedgewood that used a matte blue glaze reminiscent of “robin’s egg blue” with white cameo-like structures affixed to the surface. These raised structures illustrate both the story of evolution and some of the decorative embellishments that the Wedgwood’s might have used on their Jasperware. The smaller pieces surrounding the bust depict the creatures that were discovered during Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands.

In Process