Selma Burke

Selma Hortense Burke was born in Mooresville, North Carolina, on the thirty-first of December 1900, the seventh of ten children of an AME minister. She trained as a nurse at Saint Agnes Hospital in Raleigh — one of the few professions open to college-educated Black women of her generation — and worked as a private nurse to several prominent New York families through the 1920s.

She studied sculpture in Vienna with Aristide Maillol and in Paris with Henri Matisse during a 1933-35 residency, returned to New York, and worked under WPA Federal Art Project commissions through the late 1930s. She took her MFA at Columbia University in 1941 — among the first African American women to earn a graduate degree in sculpture at Columbia.

In 1943 — in response to a national competition for a commemorative profile portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to mark his fourth term — Burke produced a bas-relief plaque from a personal sitting she had been granted at the White House. Roosevelt sat for her on the twenty-second of February 1944. The plaque was unveiled at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C., by President Truman in September 1945 (Roosevelt had died in April).

The U.S. Mint then commissioned John R. Sinnock to design a Roosevelt dime to be released in 1946 to commemorate the president's polio-research foundation. Sinnock's design closely resembled the profile from Burke's plaque. The U.S. Mint denied any direct influence; Burke maintained, with substantial supporting evidence in the visual record, that her plaque was the source. The Roosevelt dime — the most-handled U.S. coin in continuous circulation since 1946 — has carried her uncredited portrait for nearly eight decades.

She continued sculpting and teaching into her nineties. She died in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-ninth of August 1995, age ninety-four.

She is honored here as the sculptor whose uncredited Roosevelt profile circulates on the American dime.