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Ethel Waters, 1896-1977
Singer and actress Ethel Waters toured the South and Midwest as a young performer on the black vaudeville circuit and moved to New York in the 1920s. She enjoyed critical success during the Harlem Renaissance, recorded popular blues songs, and starred on Broadway throughout the 1930s. Her friend Antonio Salemme sculpted a clay version of this bust in summer 1927, after the Broadway musical Africana opened, featuring the "statuesque" Waters. She reflected that Salemme's bust "brought out much of what I'd been like as a girl and was now like as a woman."
Antonio Salemme, 1991 |