- Selma Burke
Selma Hortense Burke (
31 December ,1900 –29 August ,1995 ) was an American sculptor.Born in Mooresville,
North Carolina to a farming family, she demonstrated an early interest in art. Her parents insisted she study a more marketable profession, and she graduated from the St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh in 1924. She then moved toHarlem , where she found work as a nurse. Burke continued sculpting in her free time, and grants in the late 1930s enabled her to study sculpture in Vienna and withAristide Maillol in Paris, culminating in her Master of Fine Arts degree fromColumbia University in 1941.Burke was chosen to sculpt a portrait of then-President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943. Completed in 1944, the 3.5-by-2.5-foot plaque was unveiled in September 1945 at the Recorder of Deeds Building inWashington, D.C. , where it still hangs today. Some historians, as well as Burke herself, believe this plaque served asJohn R. Sinnock 's inspiration for his obverse design on the Roosevelt dime.At the age of 80, in 1980, Burke produced her last monumental work, a statue of
Martin Luther King Jr. that graces Marshall Park inCharlotte, North Carolina .Burke is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.References
*Opitz, Glenn B , Editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
* [http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/642/Selma_Burke_was_a_gifted_artist Selma Burke's entry on the African-American Registry]
* [http://www.octobergallery.com/artists/burke.htm October Gallery]
* [http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem/faces/burke_text.html Kennedy Center biography of Selma Burke]
* [http://www.liu.edu/CWIS/CWP/library/aavaahp.htm#burke Long Island University biography]
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