It's crazy how people all over the country have a piece of historic black art in their pockets. Selma Hortense Burke (December 31st, 1900 - August 29th, 1995) was a sculptor, teacher, and a World War II Navy Veteran. In 1943 Ms. Burke competed in the national contest and won the opportunity to sculpt President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He sat for her for 45 minutes and from those sketches, she created the portrait we now see every day on the face of a dime.
Ms. Burke is so much more than that. At seven years old she dug her small mahogany hands into the soft clay at the riverbed. "It was there [...] that I discovered me," she recalled. Her connection to the earth and the artistry of her Grandmother, a painter, blossomed. Art ran through her bloodline and would not be ignored.
"You can't make a living at that," Mary Elizabeth Colfield Burke, her mother, scolded.
Abiding by her loving mother's warning, Ms. Burke went on to attend Winston Salem State University and graduated from the St. Agnes Training School for Nurses. She also got married to Durant Woodward, a childhood friend. Death, however, ended their union less than a year later.
Harlem was her next stop in the late 1920s, working as a private nurse to the wealthy heiress Amelia Waring. Art still called to her and she began art classes at Sarah Lawrence College. To pay for school she modeled in art classes, determined not to miss this opportunity to hone her skills. The Harlem Renaissance was bubbling and brewing at the same time and after marrying Claude McKay, a poet and novelist, she found herself involved in the mix. Her marriage to Claude was tumultuous at best, as he smashed the clay models she made that he felt didn't meet his standard. What an odd place to be when the man you married introduces you to the community that will catapult your career as a sculptor while at the same time watching your hard work shatter to pieces as if it were nothing.
In Harlem she began to explore her passion for teaching, working under the sculptor Augusta Savage at the Harlem Community Arts Center. She traveled to Europe studying sculture in Vienna, and Paris, where she met Henri Matisse who loved her work. Imagine meeting one of the greatest artists of the time and being praised for your work. Ms. Burke was stepping into her highest artistic self.
WWII changed things, she left Europe and enlisted in the Navy as one of the first African American women to do so. She drove a truck at the Brooklyn Navy Yard because she believed that during the war "artists should get out of their studios."
In 1941, she found herself gaining her Masters in Fine Arts at Columbia University on a full scholarship. A year earlier she had opened the Selma Burke School of Sculpture, fully committing to teaching the art she loved so much. In 1946 came the Selma Burke Art School, and then the Selma Burke Art Center.
Ms Burke was an activist and advocate and used her art to lift a ban in Mooresville preventing black children from using the local library. She donated a bust on the condition that they lift that abhorrent ban and the town conceded.
While we take time to give her the flowers she's owed let us pause to reflect on the honors she received while she was with us. Honorary Doctorates from Livingston College, Spelman College, and more. Milton Shapp, then Governor, declared Selma Burke Day on July 29th, 1975. She was a member of the first group of women to receive lifetime achievement awards from the Women's Caucus of Art, in 1979. She was awarded the Candace Award by the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1983. In 1988 she received the Pearl S. Buck Foundation's Women's Award. Not last nor least, she was also awarded the Essence Magazine Award in 1989.
It is our pleasure at Black Artist Forward to honor this talented, generous, educated, and phenomenal Black Woman Artist.
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