Elizabeth Catlett

Education and the classroom

Elizabeth Catlett grew up in segregated Washington, D.C. She studied at Howard University and then pursued sculpture at the University of Iowa, where Grant Wood encouraged her to draw on subjects she knew. From 1940 to 1942 she chaired Dillard University’s art department. She arranged an exceptional closed-day museum visit for students excluded by segregation.

Teaching and access were connected concerns. A museum visit could be part of artistic education while also exposing the restrictions placed on the students who sought it.

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Building a life in Mexico

Catlett went to Mexico in 1946 with Charles White. At the Taller de Gráfica Popular she worked within a politically engaged printmaking community. After their divorce she married painter Francisco Mora and raised a family. U.S. authorities investigated the workshop and classified her as an undesirable alien, restricting her return. She became a Mexican citizen in 1962; U.S. citizenship was restored in 2002.

At UNAM she became the first woman to teach sculpture and later headed the department. Raúl Anguiano introduced her to the workshop’s use of series, a format suited to connecting individual images with a broader political account.

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Prints, sculpture and later collaboration

Her fifteen-part linocut sequence, originally The Negro Woman and later The Black Woman, made Black women’s lives its subject. A block was subsequently lost, so the 1989 edition represented in MoMA contains fourteen prints.

Her practice also included sculpture and later collaborative print production. The National Gallery’s records credit Joseph Kleineman and Maureen Turci on Links Together and Randy Hemminghaus and Anne Q. McKeown on Gossip.

She continued living and working between Cuernavaca and New York into her later years, dying in 2012.

Her political commitments matter, but they do not make every work interchangeable. A carved surface, a printed impression and a sculpture occupy different spaces and reach viewers in different ways.

Sources for this section: [4] · [3] · [2]