Burke, Selma Hortense (1900–1995)

African-American sculptor who, among other works, created the profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt that appears on the U.S. dime. Born in Mooresville, North Carolina, in 1900; died on August 29, 1995, in New-town, Pennsylvania; seventh of ten children of an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister and Mary L. Burke; attended Slater Industrial and State Normal School (later Winston-Salem State University); attended Saint Agnes Training School for Nurses, Raleigh, North Carolina; attended Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; studied art at Sarah Lawrence College; MFA, Columbia College, 1941; twice married poet Claude McKay (twice divorced); married Herman Kobbe (an architect), late 1940s (died, 1950s).

Although Selma Burke is remembered as the sculptor who created the profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt that appears on the United States dime, she created many other critically acclaimed works in her lifetime. In a career that spanned the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, and two world wars, Burke was still going strong in her 90s, sometimes working on three or four projects at a time.

As a child, Selma Burke's creative impulses were soon apparent as she worked with clay dug out of a dried-up river bed near her home, fashioning butterflies and other forms. To appease her mother's wish that she prepare for a field more lucrative than art, she attended nursing school but returned to her art studies when a wealthy woman for whom she was working urged her to follow her passion. Burke moved to Philadelphia and began studying sculpture at the Leonardo da Vinci School. She then worked at New York's Cooper Union before receiving scholarships to Sarah Lawrence and Columbia College, both of which she attended, earning her MFA at Columbia in 1941. She next traveled to Europe, where she studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffman. In Paris, she consulted with painter Henri Matisse, later recalling, "He said that I had a big talent and he wanted me to add size and volume to my drawings. He wanted me to open up as a person."

The sculpture that appears on the dime was Burke's winning entry in a 1943 competition to design a portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt for a plaque to adorn a new federal building in Washington (unveiled by President Harry S. Truman in 1945). Her portrait of Roosevelt was made on butcher paper in a 45-minute session with the president and was later criticized by Eleanor Roosevelt as making her husband look too young. Said Burke to the first lady, "I've not done it for today, but for tomorrow and tomorrow."

Her other well-known works include the bust of Duke Ellington at the Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee; portraits of Booker T. Washington and Mary McLeod Bethune ; the eight-foot bronze statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King at Marshall Park, Charlotte, North Carolina; and sculptures of John Brown and President Calvin Coolidge. Calling Burke the "grand dame of African-American artists," Nanette Acker-Clark , director of the Afro-American Museum in Philadelphia, also regarded her as significant to American art in general.

Burke devoted much of her life to teaching art and sculpture. She taught at Livingston College, Swarthmore College, and Harvard University, as well as Friends Charter School in Pennsylvania and Harlem Center in New York. She founded the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh and the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York. The Selma Burke Gallery, which opened in 1983 at Winston-Salem State University, was her longtime dream; the gallery contains over 100 works from her private collection as well as works of other prominent artists such as Romare Bearden, Richard Satterwhite, and Claude Ward. In 1990, the gallery was moved to Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Burke was married to poet Claude McKay, whom she divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Her second marriage to architect Herman Kobbe ended with his death in the 1950s. Once telling an interviewer that "art was enough," Burke had no children. She died at the age of 94 in a nursing home and hospice in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts