Elizabeth Catlett

BORN: APRIL 15, 1915, WASHINGTON, DC

DIED: APRIL 2, 2012, CUERNAVACA, MEXICO

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 was an internationally known printmaker and sculptor whose art was always fiercely socially conscious. Her signature pieces focused on African Americans, women, and the lives of working-class people. Part of her goal as an activist “womanist” artist was to make political statements and to make her work accessible to everyone. In bold strokes, she carved a series of fifteen linocuts with titles like Survivor, Sharecropper, and Negro Mother in an epic commemoration of the historic oppression, resistance, and survival of African American women. Linocuts based on her sculpture Mother and Child, which won first prize at the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, had a major effect on the art world. Elizabeth became one of the most prominent African American artists of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth earned a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology but was denied admission when school administrators learned that she was Black. Undaunted, she enrolled at Howard University, where her teachers included painter Lois Mailou Jones, art historian James Porter, and philosopher Alain Locke. Later, she studied with Grant Wood at the University of Iowa, where she was the first African American to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree.

After teaching at several African American institutions, in 1946 she was awarded a Rosenwald fellowship. She traveled to Mexico City, where she was invited to work at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artists’ collective dedicated to graphic arts that promoted leftist political causes, social issues, and education. Elizabeth forged friendships with Diego Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, David Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and other socially conscious artists from the African diaspora. Elizabeth became the first female professor of sculpture in the National Fine Arts School at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and later served as chair of the sculpture department.

Elizabeth’s work can be found in major collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Art historian Melanie Herzog called her “the foremost African American woman artist of her generation.”