Not Just a Question of Race: the art of Elizabeth Catlett
by: Adam Falik | posted: Apr 2, 2009
Speaking on the phone from her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett told me a moving story about how she’d given a nurse she’d recently met in a New York City hospital a pass to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which includes Catlett’s art in its permanent collection). The middle-aged woman, making $8 per hour as a nurse, had never once been to a museum. Catlett sent her there, making sure the nurse brought her own lunch because the museum cafeteria is expensive. The nurse loved the experience, spent three hours walking around checking out everything she could, and couldn’t wait to return again.
The story is resonant of another event in Catlett’s life. In the early 1940’s, while she was head of the Art Department at Dilliard University, Catlett petitioned for and accompanied a busload of 160 black students to see a Picasso exhibit that included Picasso’s Guernica. At the time, African Americans were not allowed at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). None of those students had ever been to a museum before. The museum had to be opened specially for their visit. The experience proved pivotal in several of the students’ lives.
Elizabeth Catlett, 93, is a painter and sculptor. There are not pages enough in this magazine, never mind this article, to properly enumerate her social and artistic accomplishments. Anyone interested in American art, in African-American art, in protest art, in social art movements, in political activism, in sculpting, in printmaking, or in the heroic life of a woman born the granddaughter of slaves who’s become one of the great figures of both America’s and Mexico’s art history, would do well to type her name into their favorite search engine and bask in her ample contributions.
At the time of our conversation, she was preparing to fly to Los Angeles to participate in the NAACP’s centennial celebration. When she returns she will work on a sculpture of Mahalia Jackson for a possible commission for the recently reopened Mahalia Jackson Theater in New Orleans. She and the mayor of New Orleans discussed the commission while Catlett was in town for the opening of a show of six decades of Catlett’s drawings at Stella Jones Gallery. After that, she promises to work on her memoirs, since her friends are urging her to “put the important aspects of my life together,” as she puts it.
Catlett is interested in identity and relationship, the self-image of the African American in their struggle for social equality. Her work primarily depicts African American women set in the natural poses of work, family, and motherhood. Her figures hold their children with more nurturing grace than a European Madonna; their painted faces are defined by planes lined with the attributes of West Indian masks; with upturned heads, they are proud; with raised fists, defiant.
“I wanted to depict women as they are,” Catlett says of her subjects, “which is strong, beautiful, and hard working. Whether their bodies are twisted by work or beaten down.”
Elizabeth Catlett was born April 15, 1915, in Washington, DC. In 1931 she won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg, but she was prohibited from attending because of her race. She instead enrolled in Howard University where she met the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, later to be reckoned as one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. He and writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois argued for the social acceptance of African Americans through art, encouraging artists to depict African American subjects and to draw on their history for subject material. Their arguments for methods of dealing with race persevere today. We are still occupied with how art serves: politically, racially, as propaganda—or whether it should serve as a social tool at all; whether art is only for art’s sake. Catlett did not engage in such arguments; she made statements, vocal and artistic; her convictions armed by the evidence of racial persecution.
In 1937, Catlett graduated cum laude from Howard University of Art. In 1940 she earned her M.F.A. from University of Iowa. That same year her limestone sculpture, Mother and Child, took first prize in the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. She continued to study and teach, to meet and engage with the leading artists of her day, but always, in every institution, she confronted racial prejudice and economic inequality, such as lesser pay for black versus white teachers. In 1946 she traveled to Mexico and joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Art Workshop), an artist collective aimed towards the social goals of the Mexican Revolution, fighting illiteracy and fascism.
Working among artists such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Francisco Mora (whom she married in 1948), Catlett learned to work with linoleum blocks, which were inexpensive, abundant, and could be used repeatedly for making widely distributed prints. Developing a technique of linecuts in areas of different linear patterns for bold black and white contrast, Catlett created images of simple realism that depicted historic oppression, social resistance, and heroic endurance. She depicted Harriet Tubman and Isabella Van Wagner, a slave who, once freed, adopted the name Sojourner Truth and spoke for women’s equality.
In the 1960s, still working from Mexico, Catlett supported the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements with images promoting the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. Those years also saw Catlett forgo her American citizenship (which was later restored to her) to become a Mexican citizen. As an American expatriate she spoke for the dispossessed of two nations, directing her art towards those struggling for cultural and economic equality. Knowing that much of her audience was illiterate, she strove for an artistic simplicity that spoke plainly to them.
Though printmaking was specifically for social and political efforts, in sculpture Catlett was able to experiment with form. She has worked in mahogany, plaster, terra cotta, cedar, walnut, bronze, and onyx. She admired English artist Henry Moore, who was also interested in the female form and, like Catlett, often conjoined mother and child in his sculptures. In sculpture it was again the African American woman who occupied her, the sustenance of a woman’s body; never the soft nudes of the European masters, but the enduring bodies of the women she knew. Catlett sought to attain the maximum from her materials, drawing forth the identity of a wood’s grain or the durable smoothness of bronze to render images of motherhood and female empowerment.
There is one element of surprising constancy throughout Catlett’s work. Whether representing the poverty stricken sharecropper, the steadfast revolutionary, or the sanguine mother bearing her child, there is a look in the eyes that can only be called serene.
“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Catlett told me. “I must remember that when working on Mahalia. She had that. Through everything she endured, she always maintained her serenity.”
