Augusta Savage became an artist despite the layers and layers of adversity that she faced as a black woman in America.

The first disadvantage was the fact that she was the middlest of all middle children (the 7th of fourteen to be exact), which is when her fight for recognition truly began. But then when she did get attention, it wasn’t exactly ideal. When Savage was a little girl, her very conservative Methodist minister father was fervently against her being an artist. He was of the school that didn’t believe in graven images and thought his little girl’s clay figurines were sinful. Nothing sends you straight to hell quite like ceramic puppies. But he was very serious about his daughter giving up her interest in art to the point that, as Savage recalls, he “almost whipped all the art out of me.” Almost…

She kept making art even through her marriage at the age of 15 to John T. Moore, the birth of her first and only child the next year and the death of her husband directly after that. She made art through her second marriage and divorce but after that decided to dedicate herself to art fully. After being denied mentorship by Solon Borglum, brother of Gutzon Borglum, the man who both designed Mount Rushmore and told Isamu Noguchi that he would never do anything worthwhile (perhaps bad taste is hereditary?), Savage went to Cooper Union in New York. She shined so brightly there that the school gave her financial aid for living costs in addition to the already free tuition. After she finished the four-year course in three years, Savage applied for a fellowship in France, which she was denied by the judging committee because she was black. She went to France anyway and studied under the one committee member who wasn’t racist.

But things were going too smoothly for too long so of course, her father had a stroke and her family’s house was destroyed by a hurricane so they all moved in with Savage in her small Manhattan apartment. To add to that her third husband, who she married in 1923, died of pneumonia on a ship returning from a meeting of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in Liberia in 1924. The hits just kept on coming. She was then given a chance to study art in Rome but couldn’t afford to go and then was stalked by eccentric and entirely psycho writer of the 1920s, Joe Gould. And then, just when she opened an art school and two galleries and things seemed chill, the art market went sour and she had to close. Savage moved to a town near Woodstock, New York to work on a mushroom farm and died on March 26, 1962. I bet you thought there was going to be a happy ending there didn’t you?