People's Sculpture

Selma Hortense Burke (December 31, 1900 – August 29, 1995) was a sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement. She is best known for a bas relief portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that inspired the profile found on the obverse of the dime. 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. She was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

After moving to New York City, she became involved with the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement through her relationship with the writer Claude McKay, with whom she shared an apartment in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. She began teaching for the Harlem Community Arts Center under the leadership of sculptor Augusta Savage and would go on to work for the Works Progress Administration on the New Deal Federal Art Project. One of her WPA works, a bust of Booker T. Washington, was given to Frederick Douglass High School in Manhattan.

She traveled to Europe twice in the 1930s. She returned to the US and won a scholarship for Columbia University, where she would receive a MFA. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta