Selma burke biography

American sculptor

Selma Hortense Burke (December 31, 1900 – August 29, 1995) was an American sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement.^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[3][4] In 1979, she was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.^[5] She summed up her life as an artist, "I really live and move in the atmosphere in which I am creating".^[6]

Biography

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.^[7][8] Her father w