Selma Burke

Selma Hortense Burke (December 31, 1900 – August 29, 1995) was an American sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

Burke is best known for a bas relief portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt which may have been the model for his image on the obverse of the dime.

She described herself as "a people's sculptor" and created many pieces of public art, often portraits of prominent African-American figures like Duke Ellington, Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington.

Selma Burke was born on December 31, 1900, in Mooresville, North Carolina, the seventh of 10 children of Reverend Neil and Mary Elizabeth Colfield Burke.

Her father was an AME Church Minister who worked on the railroads for additional income.

She would later describe the feeling of squeezing the clay through her fingers as a first encounter with sculpture, saying "It was there in 1907 that I discovered me."

Burke's interest in sculpture was encouraged by her maternal grandmother, a painter, although her mother thought she should pursue a more financially stable career.

"You can't make a living at that," Burke recalls her mother saying about her desire to study art.

Burke attended Winston-Salem State University before graduating in 1924 from the St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh.

She married a childhood friend, Durant Woodward, in 1928, although the marriage ended with his death less than a year later.

She later moved to Harlem to work as a private nurse.

She was employed as a private nurse to a wealthy heiress.

This heiress later became a patron of Burke and helped her become financially stable during the great depression.

Burke traveled to Europe twice in the 1930s, first on a Rosenwald fellowship to study sculpture in Vienna in 1933-34.

After moving to New York City in 1935, Burke began art classes at Sarah Lawrence College.

She also worked as a model in art classes to pay for that schooling.

In 1935, during this time, she also became involved with the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement through her marriage with the writer Claude McKay, with whom she shared an apartment in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan.

The relationship was brief and tumultuous – McKay would destroy her clay models when he did not find the work to be up to his standards – but it introduced Burke to an artistic community that would support her burgeoning career.

Burke began teaching for the Harlem Community Arts Center under the leadership of sculptor Augusta Savage, and would go on to work for the Works Progress Administration on the New Deal Federal Art Project.

One of her WPA works, a bust of Booker T. Washington, was given to Frederick Douglass High School in Manhattan in 1936.

She returned in 1936 to study in Paris with Aristide Maillol.

While in Paris she met Henri Matisse, who praised her work.

One of her most significant works from this period is "Frau Keller" (1937), a portrait of a German-Jewish woman in response to the rising Nazi threat which would convince Burke to leave Europe later that year.

With the onset of World War II, Burke chose to work in a factory as a truck driver for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

It was her opinion that, during the war, "artists should get out of their studios."

In 1940 Burke founded the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York City.

She was committed to teaching art.

After returning to the United States, Burke won a graduate school scholarship to Columbia University, where she would receive a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1941.

She opened the Selma Burke Art School in New York City in 1946, and later opened the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1949 Burke married architect Herman Kobbe, and moved with him to an artists' colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Kobbe died in 1955, but Burke continued to live in her New Hope home until her death in 1995, at the age of 94.

Open from 1968 to 1981, the center "was an original art center that played an integral role in the Pittsburgh art community," offering courses ranging from studio workshops to puppetry classes.

Burke used her art to make opportunities to bring people together.

In Mooresville, black children were banned from use of the public library.

With her rising fame, Burke chose to donate a bust of a local doctor on the condition that the ban be removed.

The town accepted.

Her father died when she was twelve and in 1970 her mother was 101 years old.

As a child, she attended a one-room segregated schoolhouse, and often played with the riverbed clay found near her home.

In 1979, she was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

She summed up her life as an artist, "I really live and move in the atmosphere in which I am creating".