Gamin
Painted cast plaster
9 1/2 x 6 x 4 1/4 inches
Circa 1930
As published in:
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
As exhibited in:
Beloved Community: African American Artists in Atlanta Collections and Beyond, 2022, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, 2018–2021, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Mississippi Musuem of Art, Jackson; Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage’s legacy is as inextricably tied to her role as an instructor and mentor to important African American artists of the postwar era as it is to her own artistic production. With only five dollars to her name, she escaped the limitations of prejudice and poverty of her small Florida hometown and moved to New York to pursue the study of sculpture—only to confront the same barriers. Her best-known work, Gamin, takes its title from the French word for “street urchin” and depicts a jaunty, albeit slightly disheveled, young boy. Long thought to be a likeness of the artist’s nephew, Gamin exists in a liminal space between individual portrait and generic type. Savage executed several bronze casts of Gamin and continued to make plaster versions into 1930; it is unclear how many she completed or how many survive.