Adjusting Our Focus

"One day, I was mixing the clay and I saw the imprint of my hands…I found that I could make something... something that I alone had created."

Selma Burke was a sculptor and educator whose work celebrated the human form and African heritage. Born in Mooresville, North Carolina, she attended school in a one-room segregated schoolhouse and was briefly enrolled in a private college prep school in Washington, DC. She discovered her love for sculpting as a child, molding riverbed clay between her fingers. Encouraged by her mother to have a practical career, she initially trained as a nurse. After working as a private nurse to a wealthy heiress in New York City, she was able to save enough money to pursue her art career. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College, later earning a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 1941 and a Ph.D. from Livingstone College in 1970. 

Burke was deeply committed to arts education. She opened several art schools in New York City and Pittsburgh and taught at institutions including the Harlem Community Art Center, Harvard University, Howard University, Haverford College, Livingstone College, and Swarthmore College. She was also an active member of the Harlem Artists Guild.

Her sculptures, created in wood, brass, and stone, often depict figures and portraits of prominent African Americans such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Duke Ellington. As a child, she was exposed to African art through two uncles who served as missionaries in Africa in the late 1800s, gathering sculptures and masks that were later displayed in the Burke family home. This early influence shaped her artistic perspective.

Her most famous work is a bronze relief of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, widely considered to be the basis for his image on the U.S. dime. Burke won a national contest to create the  sculpture and met with Roosevelt for two days in 1944, creating an image of a younger, more vital figure–one more familiar to the American people. The final plaque, Four Freedoms, was unveiled in 1945 at the Recorder of Deeds building in Washington, DC, where it remains today. Burke said she made the sculpture “not for today only, but for tomorrow and tomorrow.”
 

• Visit The Smithsonian American Art Museum at G Street Northwest &, 8th St NW, Washington, DC 20004 where her work Untitled (Woman and Child) (ca. 1950) is on display.
• Visit the Historic Recorder of Deeds building at 515 D St. NW to see her plaque Four Freedoms (1945)