“I have always wanted my art to service my people – to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”
—Elizabeth Catlett
An accomplished printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy is defined by her dual commitment to her creative process and political convictions. Born in 1915 in Washington, D.C. to a widowed mother, her grandparents had been previously enslaved in Virginia and North Carolina. Their stories of the capture of their people in Africa and life on the plantations colored Catlett’s childhood, and as the Great Depression cast a shadow across her youth, Catlett witnessed firsthand the class inequality and racial violence that ravaged America. As a young adult, Catlett defied the contemporary expectations of and prejudices against her as a Black woman to earn one of the first M.F.A. degrees at the University of Iowa, where one of her mentors, the Regionalist painter Grant Wood, advised her to make art about “something you know the most about." Inspired by contemporary artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the political circles of Chicago’s South Side – both locales where Catlett taught and took classes at points in her life – her art began to take shape as a point of convergence between populist symbolism and abstraction, taking on the subjects she knew best: women, Black people, and the working class.
In 1946, Catlett first visited Mexico to engage with the region’s printmaking community; she soon joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Art Workshop), a workshop that espoused a collective ethos and spearheaded direct engagement with social issues and political activism. Due to the Communist affiliations of some Taller members and Catlett’s own arrest in relation to a Mexico City railroad strike, the artist came under surveillance by the United States Embassy in 1949 and was later declared an “undesirable alien,” barred from returning to the U.S. for over a decade. However, Catlett remained undeterred by her home country’s hostility, and made Mexico her home by working with local feminist groups, staying up to date on the struggle for Black liberation through the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, and continuing an output of sculptures and prints that reflected leftist sociopolitical causes in America and Mexico, drawing from both African and Mexican art traditions. Unable to obtain a visa to attend a 1970 conference at Northwestern University held in her honor, Catlett gave her remarks by phone and declared:
“I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!”
—Elizabeth CatlettAn exhilarating tribute to a revolutionary artist once shunned from the U.S., Catlett’s life and achievements across sculpture, painting and printmaking – and in the sphere of sociopolitical activism – are the subjects of the current exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies at the Brooklyn Museum, running from September 13 to January 19, 2025. The exhibition, which exemplifies Catlett’s unyielding dedication to Black pride, revolutionary change, and artistic rigor, will then travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. followed by the Art Institute of Chicago later in 2025.
