Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white passenger, once the "white" section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the Black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
Elizabeth Catlett, born as Alice Elizabeth Catlett, also known as Elizabeth Catlett Mora was an African-American sculptor and graphic artist best known for her depictions of the Black-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C., to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of formerly enslaved people. It was difficult for a black woman at this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship awarded to her in 1946 allowed her to travel to Mexico City, where she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular for twenty years and became head of the sculpture department for the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In the 1950s, her main means of artistic expression shifted from print to sculpture, though she never gave up the former.
Robert Berks was an American sculptor, industrial designer and planner. He created hundreds of bronze sculptures and monuments including the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial, and the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C. Bob was prolific and created numerous sketches, drawings, and paintings; often in service of sculpture and site-planning subjects. He worked for over 50 years in a converted schoolhouse on the north fork of Long Island, NY. For projects with living subjects, Bob would often invite individuals to visit with he and Tod for a period of a week or two so he could observe them in real life; through this time he captured emotions, tendencies, facial expressions, and body language. It was this commitment to understanding his subject below the surface that facilitated the intimacy and personality found in his sculptural portraits. Bob's work is spread around the world, but he is best known for his commissions in Washington DC. Bob is one of the only artists in the world to have multiple pieces regularly on display in the Oval office. Depending on the desires of the sitting US President, Berks' busts of famed civil servants and civil rights leaders line the walls of the Oval ; most often on view are busts of FDR, Lincoln, RFK, Ronald Reagan, and JFK.
Selma Hortense Burke was an American sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Burke is best known for a bas relief portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt which may have been the model for his image 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. In 1979, she was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. She summed up her life as an artist, "I really live and move in the atmosphere in which I am creating".
Anne Whitney was an American sculptor and poet. She made full-length and bust sculptures of prominent political and historical figures, and her works are in major museums in the United States. She received prestigious commissions for monuments. Two statues of Samuel Adams were made by Whitney and are located in Washington, D.C.'s National Statuary Hall Collection and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. She also created two monuments to Leif Erikson.
Chauncey Bradley Ives was an American sculptor who worked primarily in the Neo-classic style. His best known works are the marble statues of Jonathan Trumbull and Roger Sherman enshrined in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
Helen Zelezny, also known in Europe as Helene Zelezny-Scholz, Helen Scholz, Helene Scholz-Zelezny or Helene Scholzová-Železná, was a Czech born sculptor and architectural sculptor. She was an influential figure in the sculpture of north Moravia and Silesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zelezny created sculpted portraits, including portraits of members of the Habsburg family, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Lady Sybil Grahamová, Benito Mussolini, and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk with whom she had a close relationship from 1932 to 1934. Zelezny is also known as an Italian sculptor as she lived and worked for many years in Rome.
Manuelita Brown is an American sculptor from San Diego, California.
The National Congress of Black Women, Inc. (NCBW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1984, dedicated to the educational, political, economic and cultural development of African American women and their families. NCBW also serves as a non-partisan voice and instrument on issues pertaining to the appointment of African American women at all levels of government, and to increase African American women's participation in the educational, political, economic and social arenas. Currently, NCBW provides opportunities for women for leadership and decision-making positions in government, nonprofit organizations and the private sector.
Brenda Putnam was an American sculptor, teacher and author.
Sojourner Truth is a public artwork by Canadian sculptor Artis Lane, located in Emancipation Hall at the United States Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. It was the first statue honoring an African-American woman in the U.S. Capitol building.
Ruth Inge Hardison was an American sculptor, artist, and photographer, known particularly for her 1960s busts entitled "Negro Giants in History". Her 1983 collection called "Our Folks", which features sculpted portraits of everyday people, is also of note. Hardison's artistic productions largely surround historical black portraiture, and she is especially interested in creatively representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (BAAL), a group that encourages awareness of black artistic accomplishments, when this organization was founded in 1969.
Tina Allen was an American sculptor known for her monuments to prominent African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and George Washington Carver.
Oliver LaGrone was an African-American sculptor, poet, educator, and humanitarian. In 1974 a post-secondary scholarship was created in his name, enlarged and refocused in 1991 for graduates of the public high school of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Amanda Matthews is an American sculptor and painter from Louisville, Kentucky, United States, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Jacob Epstein's bronze bust of Winston Churchill was completed in 1947 and cast in an edition often said to number 10. Epstein was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to create a sculpture of former British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1945, after the end of the Second World War and shortly after Churchill lost the 1945 UK general election. Two casts have been previously displayed in the Oval Office. Another remains on display in the atrium of Churchill College, Cambridge.
A bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was made by African-American artist Charles Alston in 1970, two years after King was assassinated. Alston received a commission from the Reverend Donald S. Harrington, of the Community Church of New York, to create a bust of King for $5,000. Five bronze busts were cast in 1970, each approximately 32 centimetres (13 in) high.
Karin Margareta Jonzen, née Löwenadler, was a British figure sculptor whose works, in bronze, terracotta and stone, were commissioned by a number of public bodies in Britain and abroad.
