Curated by the art historian Jeffreen M. Hayes at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla., the show is peppered with photographs, letters and works by other artists who were inspired or taught by Savage during her active years in Harlem. It vividly conveys the world that she determinedly created for herself, against the odds of poverty, sexism and racism, which it also makes apparent.

Read the contemptuous expressions on many of the white faces — along with Savage’s seeming alienation — in two photographs taken at the opening in 1939 of Savage’s short-lived gallery, the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art in Harlem. The salon followed by seven years the art school she had established in her studio in 1932, upon returning from study in Paris, where her teachers had included the French sculptor Charles Despiau (1874-1946), best known for his portrait busts.

On view are early unfamiliar works by some of Savage’s students and friends including Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Selma Burke and Gwendolyn Knight and her husband, Jacob Lawrence. Knight sat for one of Savage’s spirited, resolute portrait busts. The photographs also reveal lost works in a tantalizing range of styles. Those here stick mostly to a realistic mode that is less conservative than first appears. (As with the American painters known as the Eight, her figures have an intensity and material looseness that undermines academicism.)

Part of Savage’s radicalness lies in her determination — one shared with many black artists today — to populate art with active representatives of black life . The show includes Savage’s “Reclining Nude” (1932), carved in a light brown marble, whose gracefully coiled pose, not at all horizontal, seems at once self-protective and assertive.