Although African American sculptor Selma Burke had lived just north of me for years, I have never had the fortune of finding any of her works on the auction tables. No one has been careless enough to toss her sculptures or single them out for any of the quality sales at my favorite auction houses.
Woe is me.
I had lived in Philadelphia for a couple years before I found out that she lived so close by in Bucks County, which for years has been a refuge for artists, most notably the New Hope School of Pennsylvania impressionists.
That was in 1993 when I was an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. A reporter had interviewed her for a story, and told me about the debate over whether she had created the embossed image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the dime. Burke and plenty others felt that John Sinnock, the U.S. Mint’s chief engraver, had gratuitously copied her design. She complained but never got credit for her work. Sinnock is also said to have lifted a design by John Frederick Lewis for a 1926 Benjamin Franklin half dollar.
Burke won a competition to sculpt Roosevelt in 1943. The result was a bronze relief plaque of the President in profile that was completed in 1944. The 3 1/2-by-2 ½ -foot piece hangs in the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington.
Recently, the story of that image came up again when an Inquirer columnist wrote about an annual scholarship to be given out in her name starting this fall at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The $12,500 scholarship is funded by the Selma Burke Sculpture Foundation with money derived from sales of prints by artist Faith Ringgold.
Burke had a long prolific life as a sculptor and educator, and I missed my chance to meet her. When I learned that she lived so close by, I should’ve gotten her phone number, called her, met her and told her how much I admired her and her work. We all have those type of regrets, even with family members. I’m always meeting people who wished they had talked more to their parents or grandparents to learn more of their history. Me, too.
Burke’s name is not one of those that come to mind when you think of the veteran African American artists, even though she lived during the Harlem Renaissance and breathed its rarefied air. In the newspaper article, one admirer who spent some time with her noted that she was not mentioned in the “good” books.
When she died in 1995, the New York Times only carried four paragraphs about her in a story online. When I checked several of the African American art books I have, she’s only mentioned sporadically. There is a short bio of her in my revised copy of Samella S. Lewis’ 1990 book “Art: African American.”
Burke moved to Bucks County in 1949, and did much of her work out of there. She founded the Bucks County Sculpture Show in 1977, which continues today. She lived in Pittsburgh for a while operating the Selma Burke Art Center, and retired to her home and the art community of New Hope in the early 1980s.
She was creating a sculpture of civil rights activist Rosa Parks when she died in 1995 at age 94.
A talented and silence hero in these yet to be United States of America.