At the 1939 New York World's Fair, a 16-foot plaster sculpture shaped like a harp, its strings formed by twelve singing Black children and its sounding board by a giant hand and arm, was one of the fair's defining masterpieces. When the fair closed, its creator could not afford to cast it in bronze or even move it, so wrecking crews smashed it to rubble. This episode explores the life of that sculptor, Augusta Savage, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and asks how an artist builds a legacy when the materials of permanence are denied to her.

Born in Florida in 1892, Savage dug red clay as a child and was beaten by her minister father for making graven images. We follow her to New York with $4.60 to her name, through Cooper Union in three years, a rescinded Fontainebleau scholarship she fought in the press, dignified busts of W.E.B. ...