Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman is the first book I’ve worked on with D Giles Ltd (in conjunction with the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville FL.) but hopefully not the last. The exhibition and book are a timely exploration of the artist and her contributions to art and cultural history in light of 21st-century attention to the concept of the artist-activist. The book contains up-to-date scholarly research, re-examines Savage’s place in the history of American sculpture and positions her as a leading figure who broke down the barriers she and her students encountered while seeking to participate fully in the art world.
The catalogue contains a variety of different elements (sculptures by the artist, other pieces by peers and contemporaries, letters and correspondence and essays exploring her work and wider influence on other artists and culture), so applying a very clean colour palette that is a nod towards Savage’s favoured medium of the red-clay soil of her native Florida, and using the crisp and timeless font Futura, developed in the early-twentieth century, gave us a design with plenty of white space and room to let the images and art breathe.
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