Selma Burke

Born in North Carolina in 1900, Selma Hortense Burke was an accomplished artist, artist’s model, arts administrator, nurse, and teacher. As a child, Burke became fascinated with the clay and mud along the creek banks on her family's land. By the time she was nine, Burke began modeling objects out of clay and hiding them under the house for safekeeping.

Despite her mother's dismay at Burke's "perplexed mannerisms," her father encouraged her interest in sculpture. Burke's curiosity was further piqued by the objects her father and uncle brought back with them when they returned from working in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America.

After attending nursing school, Burke moved to New York in 1924. While working as a private nurse, she became involved in the Works Progress Administration and the Art Students League, meeting artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden and writers including Claude McKay and Countee Cullen. A bust of Booker T. Washington created by Burke as part of the WPA was given to Manhattan's Frederick Douglass High School in 1936. She also spent time studying in Europe: first in Vienna, then Paris.

Burke also taught sculpture at the Harlem Community Art Center, which operated from 1937 to 1942 under the direction of the legendary sculptor Augusta Savage. As part of the New Deal Federal Art Project, the Harlem Community Art Center offered free instruction in fields including drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture to neighborhood residents, eventually leading to the formation of the Harlem Arts Alliance.

According to some accounts, Burke said Roosevelt "wiggled too much" as she sketched him. She told him to sit still — and he did. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, expressed uncertainty about depicting the president in profile, but Burke remained confident. "This profile is not for today," she said, "but for tomorrow and all time." She ultimately sculpted a plaque based on her sketches, which was unveiled in 1945 at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C., where it remains today.

It is widely acknowledged that U.S. Mint Chief Engraver John Sinnock's design on the Roosevelt Dime is adapted from Burke's plaque. Despite this, Burke received no recognition from the United States government, and her initials do not appear on image on the dime. It wasn't until 1990, when Burke met with the Roosevelt family, that she finally received recognition for her work.

Burke's Mother and Child (1968) was notably included in the landmark exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art organized by the late Dr. David C. Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of national bicentennial festivities in 1976. Widely considered the first-ever comprehensive survey of African American Art, the exhibition later traveled to Atlanta's High Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Drawing on Burke's signature theme of mother and child, Uplift shows a female figure holding a small child before her while another child wraps her arms the figure's waist. "The motivation is what Johnetta Cole is about," Burke told the Spelman Messenger, "and that is building a bigger, and uplifting a better, Spelman College."