Catlett, Elizabeth

CATLETT, ELIZABETH (1915-2012). In the United States and in Mexico, African American artist, educator, and activist Elizabeth Catlett produced an unparalleled body of politically charged and aesthetically compelling prints and sculpture that affirmed her solidarity with the struggles and aspirations of Mexicans and African Americans, with working-class and impoverished women across political borders and cultural divides, and with liberation movements throughout Latin America and other parts of the world.

Born in Washington, DC, she received her Bachelor of Science in Art, cum laude, from Howard University in 1935. As a teacher in Durham, North Carolina, she participated with lawyer Thurgood Marshall in an unsuccessful effort to gain equal pay for Black teachers. In 1940 she received the first Master of Fine Arts degree earned in sculpture at the University of Iowa. In Chicago the following summer she experienced for the first time a community of socially engaged and politically active artists committed to producing art for social change. For two years she taught drawing, painting, printmaking, and art history at Dillard University in New Orleans and then moved to New York. Inspired by her students at the George Washington Carver People’s School, a night school for working people in Harlem where she taught sculpture and sewing and served as promotion director, she sought a Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to produce a series of prints, paintings, and sculpture on the subject of "The Negro Woman." With her Rosenwald she traveled to Mexico City to study sculpture and make prints as a guest artist at Mexico’s internationally renowned Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, People’s Graphic Arts Workshop). In 1947 she established permanent residence in Mexico.

Catlett’s move to Mexico was in part a response to Cold War attacks on progressive US artists, intellectuals, and activists. She also found a community of artists at the TGP whose aims were in accord with her own, and she married painter and TGP printmaker Francisco Mora (1922-2002) with whom she had three sons. Shaped by Mexico’s post-revolution leftist cultural ethos, the political and artistic ambiance of the TGP was critically important for Catlett and other African American artists who traveled to Mexico at mid-twentieth century. As a member of the TGP until 1966, she honed her technical command of her print mediums, primarily linoleum and lithography, and layered into her identification with her African American subjects an increasingly profound empathy for and solidarity with Mexican working women, urban laborers, and rural campesinos. In 1959 she became the first woman sculpture professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, where she taught until 1975.

Most often figurative, her sculpture manifests the sensitivity to form and deep engagement with the physical properties and tactile substance of her materials – wood, stone and clay, sometimes cast in bronze – that accrued throughout her lifetime of practice as a sculptor.

In 1962 Catlett became a Mexican citizen and was subsequently denied entry to the United States. Though she was barred from her country of origin, during the 1960s her work proclaimed solidarity with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and particularly emphasized the role of women in these movements. In her later years she received major commissions, several honorary degrees, and numerous honors. While she would not have hesitated to remind us that art alone cannot change the world, Elizabeth Catlett firmly believed that art can raise consciousness of injustice, expose abuses of power, and illuminate possibilities for social transformation.

Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective. Exhibition Catalogue. Curated by Lucinda Gedeon, with essays by Michael Brenson and Lowery Stokes Sims. Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1998.

Herzog, Melanie Anne. Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Herzog, Melanie Anne. In the Image of the People. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Herzog, Melanie Anne. “Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico at Mid-Century: Navigating Gender and Visual Politics across Cultural Borders,” in American Women Artists, 1935–1970: Gender, Culture, and Politics, edited by Helen Langa and Paula Wizotski. Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2016, 75–92.

Herzog, Melanie Anne. “My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples”: Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico,” in The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America, edited by Jessica Stites Mor and Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018, 23-52.

Lewis, Samella. The Art of Elizabeth Catlett. Claremont, CA: Hancraft Studios, 1984.

Schreiber, Rebecca. Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.