Elizabeth Catlett

Born in Washington, DC, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) moved to Mexico in 1946. Still, her artwork always remained attuned to the Black American experience. Her expressive linocuts of sharecroppers, fieldworkers or, more symbolically, “survivors” depicted the lived realities of Black men and women, while her prints of Harriet Tubman and Phyllis Wheatley constructed a new national history. Catlett’s body of work shares both aesthetic and theoretical sensibilities with major regional movements and their figures: women sculptors and printmakers working in Europe, including Barbara Hepworth and Käthe Kollwitz; Black American artists operating in an overtly political vein including John Woodrow Wilson and Jacob Lawrence; and members of the modernist “Mexican School,” including her partner, muralist Francisco Mora.
In the late 1950s Catlett transitioned from printmaking to sculpture, creating softer, more sensuous figures of seated and reclining women or mothers cradling their children. However, she remained a ceaseless activist, especially for the rights of Black and Mexican women, and believed in making fine art accessible to all. This publication commemorates the first institutional survey of her work.