ARTNOIR'S AFRICAN/AMERICAN ART HISTORY 101

SELMA HORTENSE BURKE (1900-1995)

One of our most well-known and talented contemporary artists' passed on August 29, 1995. Her list of works include busts of Amazon (n.d.), Amazonia Temptation (1938), Edith Barome, Mary McLeod Bethune, Bowed Down (1969), Boy's Head (n.d.), Compassion, Deborah (n.d.), Falling Angel, Grief (n.d.), Mary Holiday (n.d.), Jim (1939), Lafayette (1938), Light and Shadow (n.d.), Morrhua Lusca (n.d.), Mother and Child (1968), Mother and Two Children (1972), Negro Woman (n.d.), Peace (1972), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1944), Safe (1972), Salome (n.d.), Seated Nude, Sleeping Swan, Stone (n.d.), Study in Cedar Wood (n.d.), Temptation (1938), Torso in Limestone (1937), Victory (n.d.), Booker Washington (1970), The Widow (1970), and Woman on the Beach. She created several reliefs including Col. William Hayward and the 369th Regiment.

Selma was born in Mooresville, North Carolina. She began her studies at the St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh and received her R.N. diploma in 1924. She continued her studies at Columbia University completing the masters program in 1941 and receiving a PhD. degree from Livingston College. After studying under Oronzio Maldarelli in Paris, Cornaham in New York City, and Povolney in Vienna, she travel and studied in Germany and Italy on a Rosenwald and Bochler Fellowship in 1938. She taught for a while at the Harlem Art Center in New York City and was an instructor of art and sculpture at many college and universities.

She has received numerous awards and commissions for sculpture, and she maintained a school of sculpture in New York City in Greenwich Village, and The Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh.

She sculpted in brass, stone and wood. Her best subjects are nudes and historical figures. The noted art historian James A. Porter (1905-1970) stated "There is an idealistic intent in her sculpture, a quality that was evoked in her pieces Lafayette (1938) and Salome (n.d.) which were exhibited in the McMillan Galleries in New York in 1941." Her most famous design is the image for the Roosevelt dime created in 1944. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sat for the bronze figure which was unveiled by President Harry S. Truman in 1945 and which is on display at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C.

*"Light and Shadow" was executed around 1962. Only two of these unique pieces were casted. Both are located in Florida - one in the Dorothy Porter Wesley Archives, and the other at the University of Florida. The showcase piece is 10" high and it mounted on a base 3" x 4".

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