Between 1931 and 1943, Harlem-based sculptor Augusta Savage proposed four monuments to honor Black American lives, but none of these works were ever executed, nor have they been included in accounts of Savage’s work and career. This lecture illuminates Savage’s thwarted efforts not just as evidence of how anti-Black racism and patriarchy shape the landscape of existing monuments, but also as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of vision, intention, or labor. Savage’s proposed but unbuilt monuments are critical to recognizing her ambitions to intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape by claiming monumentality as a space of representation for Black subjects. This lecture explores the space these unbuilt monuments would have taken up in the world, attempting to glimpse the specific shape of their absence.

Tess Korobkin is assistant professor of American art at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her interests include histories of sculpture, the politics of materiality and intermediality, and constructions of race and resistance in American art. Her current book project, Reinventing Monumentality: Sculpture, Race, and Photography in the 1930s, interrogates the public life of sculptural bodies in an era of social upheaval, emergent modernisms, and the rise of documentary photography.

The lecture will be held in the Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall.