Elizabeth Catlett facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett, 1986 (photograph by Fern Logan)
Born	Alice Elizabeth Catlett (1915-04-15)April 15, 1915 Washington, D.C., United States
Died	April 2, 2012(2012-04-02) (aged 96) Cuernavaca, Mexico
Nationality	United States of America, Mexico
Other names	Elizabeth Catlett Mora
Education	School of the Art Institute of Chicago, South Side Community Art Center
Alma mater	Howard University, University of Iowa
Occupation	sculptor, art teacher, graphic artist
Employer	Taller de Gráfica Popular, Faculty of Arts and Design
Works	Students Aspire
Spouse(s)	Charles Wilbert White (m. 1941–1946; divorced) Francisco Mora (painter) (m. 1947–2002; his death)
Children	3, including Juan Mora Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett, born Alice Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915 – April 2, 2012), was an amazing African American artist. She was a talented sculptor and graphic artist. She is famous for showing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century, often focusing on women.

Elizabeth was born and grew up in Washington, D.C.. Her parents worked in education, and her grandparents had been enslaved. It was very hard for a Black woman to become a working artist back then. Elizabeth spent much of her career teaching art. In 1946, she received a special award that allowed her to travel to Mexico City. There, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular for twenty years. She also became the head of the sculpture department at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In the 1950s, she started focusing more on sculpture, but she never stopped making prints.

Her art mixes abstract and figurative styles, following the Modernist tradition. She was inspired by African art and Mexican art. Catlett's work is often called "social realism." This means she used her art to show important social issues and the lives of African Americans. She believed her art's main goal was to share social messages, not just to be pretty. Many art students study her work to learn how to show ideas about race, gender, and social class. Elizabeth Catlett received many awards during her life for her incredible contributions to art.

Elizabeth Catlett's Students Aspire, 1977, at Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Early Life and Art

Elizabeth Catlett was born and raised in Washington, D.C.. Her mother and father were both children of formerly enslaved people. Her grandmother shared stories with her about their ancestors being captured in Africa and the tough life on plantations. Elizabeth was the youngest of three children. Both her parents worked in education. Her mother was a truant officer, and her father taught math. Sadly, her father died before she was born, so her mother worked many jobs to support the family.

Elizabeth became interested in art at a young age. As a child, she loved a wood carving of a bird her father had made. In high school, she studied art with a relative of the famous Frederick Douglass.

Education and Artistic Journey

Elizabeth Catlett went to Howard University for her college studies. She graduated with honors, even though it wasn't her first choice. She had also been accepted to the Carnegie Institute of Technology. However, they refused her admission when they found out she was Black. Years later, in 2008, Carnegie Mellon University apologized for this injustice. They gave her an honorary doctorate degree and held an art show of her work.

At Howard University, Elizabeth was taught by famous artists like Lois Mailou Jones. She also met other important artists and thinkers. Her mother's savings and scholarships helped pay for her tuition. She graduated in 1937. At that time, it was very unusual for a Black woman to become a professional artist. So, she planned to be an art teacher. After graduating, she taught art at Hillside High School in North Carolina.

Elizabeth became interested in the work of American painter Grant Wood. She joined the graduate program at the University of Iowa where he taught. Grant Wood told her to create art about what she knew best. So, Elizabeth began sculpting images of African-American women and children. Even though she was accepted, she wasn't allowed to live in the school dorms because she was Black. She rented a room off-campus instead. In 1940, she became one of the first three people to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the university. She was also the first African-American woman to achieve this.

After Iowa, Catlett moved to New Orleans to work at Dillard University. She spent her summer breaks in Chicago. In Chicago, she studied ceramics and printmaking. She also met her first husband, artist Charles W. White. They married in 1941. In 1942, they moved to New York. There, Elizabeth taught art to adults in Harlem. She also studied printmaking and sculpture. A Russian sculptor named Ossip Zadkine encouraged her to add abstract ideas to her art. In New York, she met many important writers and artists like Langston Hughes and Jacob Lawrence.

In 1946, Elizabeth received a special grant to travel to Mexico with her husband to study art. She wanted to explore art that focused on social issues. Soon after moving to Mexico, she and Charles White divorced. In 1947, she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular. This was a workshop dedicated to creating prints that supported social causes and education. There, she met artist Francisco Mora, whom she married later that year. They had three sons, who all became artists themselves. In 1948, she studied wood and ceramic sculpture in Mexico. During this time, she became even more dedicated to her art. She also met famous Mexican artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

In 2006, Elizabeth Catlett sold some of her prints to the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. She donated the money to create a scholarship fund. This fund helps African-American and Latino students who study printmaking. A residence hall at the University of Iowa is also named in her honor.

Activism Through Art

Elizabeth Catlett worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) from 1946 to 1966. Because some TGP members were involved in political movements, and because of her own activism, the United States government watched her. Eventually, she was not allowed to enter the United States. She was called an "undesirable alien." This meant she couldn't visit her sick mother before she passed away. In 1962, she gave up her American citizenship and became a citizen of Mexico.

In 1971, after many friends and colleagues wrote letters to the government, she was given special permission to visit the U.S. for an exhibition of her work.

Later Years and Legacy

After retiring from her teaching job in 1975, Elizabeth Catlett moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico. In 1983, she and her husband Francisco Mora bought an apartment in New York. They spent part of each year there until Francisco's death in 2002. Elizabeth regained her American citizenship in 2002.

Elizabeth continued to create art until she passed away peacefully in her home in Cuernavaca on April 2, 2012. She was 96 years old. She left behind her three sons, ten grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Career Highlights

Early in her career, Elizabeth Catlett worked on a government art project for unemployed artists in the 1930s. This experience showed her the social art of artists like Diego Rivera.

She spent much of her career teaching art. Her first teaching job was in North Carolina. She was unhappy because Black teachers were paid less. She even joined a campaign with Thurgood Marshall to fight for equal pay. After graduate school, she taught at Dillard University in New Orleans. She arranged a special visit to the New Orleans Museum of Art for her Black students, as the museum was usually closed to them. She later became the head of the art department there. Her last major teaching job was at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico, starting in 1958. She was the first female professor of sculpture there. A year later, she became the head of the sculpture department, despite protests that she was a woman and a foreigner. She stayed there until she retired in 1975.

When she moved to Mexico, Catlett's first art job was with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). This famous workshop created graphic art to support political causes, social issues, and education. At the TGP, she and other artists made prints featuring important Black figures. They also created posters, leaflets, and illustrations for textbooks. Sharecropper, a print she made at the TGP, is one of her most famous works. It shows a strong, dignified figure despite poverty. Catlett learned a lot at the TGP about how Mexican culture blended Indigenous, Spanish, and African backgrounds. This was similar to the experiences of African Americans. She stayed with the workshop for twenty years. Her posters of figures like Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X were shared widely.

Her art began to be shown regularly in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in the United States. People became very interested in her work because of social movements like the Black Arts Movement and feminism. She had over fifty individual art shows during her lifetime. Important shows included those at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her work was also regularly shown at the June Kelly Gallery for many years. In 2020, the Philadelphia Museum of Art featured her work in an online exhibition.

The Legacy Museum, which opened in 2018, displays the history of slavery and racism in America. It features artwork by Elizabeth Catlett and other artists.

Awards and Recognition

Elizabeth Catlett received many awards and honors during her life. These include:

• First Prize at the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago.
• Being recognized by the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in 1956.
• The Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Iowa in 1996.
• A traveling art show of her work in 1998.
• A NAACP Image Award in 2009.
• A special tribute after her death in 2013 by the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
• An award from the Women's Caucus for Art.
• The Art Institute of Chicago Legends and Legacy Award.
• "Elizabeth Catlett Week" in Berkeley, California.
• "Elizabeth Catlett Day" in Cleveland.
• Honorary citizenship of New Orleans.
• Honorary doctorates from Pace University and Carnegie Mellon.
• The International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award for sculpture.
• A Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1991.

By the end of her career, her sculptures and other works sold for a lot of money. In 2017, the University of Iowa named a new residence hall after her.

Elizabeth Catlett was also featured in a BBC Radio 4 series called An Alternative History of Art in 2018.

Artistry and Style

Catlett is best known for her sculptures and print work. Her sculptures are often powerful, but her prints are more widely known, especially from her time with the Taller de Gráfica Popular. While she always made prints, she focused more on sculpture starting in the 1950s.

Her prints were mainly woodcuts and linocuts. Her sculptures used many different materials, such as clay, cedar, mahogany, marble, bronze, and Mexican stone. She often made the same art piece using different materials. Her sculptures varied in size, from small wood figures to huge works for public places. These large works include a 10.5-foot sculpture of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans and a 7.5-foot work of Sojourner Truth in Sacramento, California.

Much of her art shows realistic, yet stylized, figures. She used Modernist ideas from artists like Henry Moore to create simple shapes that show human emotions. She was also greatly influenced by African and ancient Mexican art. Her works don't focus on individual people. Instead, they show general ideas and feelings. Her art came from her honest thoughts about her life and how she saw society's racism, classism, and sexism. Many young artists study her work to learn about themes of gender, race, and class.

Mother and Child, 1939

Her art explored themes like social injustice, the human condition, historical figures, women, and the bond between mother and child. These themes were especially connected to the African-American experience in the 20th century, with some influence from Mexican life. This focus began at the University of Iowa, where she was told to create art about what she knew best. Her most famous early work was the sculpture Mother and Child (1939), which won first prize at an art show in Chicago.

Her subjects range from tender images of mothers to strong symbols of Black Power. She also created portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and writer Phillis Wheatley. She believed art could help build a sense of identity for different groups of people. Her best-known works show Black women as strong and caring. These women are often shown with powerful, confident poses. Her The Black Woman Speaks series of prints was one of the first in Western art to show American Black women as heroic and complex people. Her work was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Black Renaissance movements. It was further strengthened by the Black Power and feminism movements in the 1960s and 70s.

The Taller de Gráfica Popular encouraged her to make her art understandable to as many people as possible. This meant balancing abstract ideas with clear, recognizable figures. She said about her time at the TGP, "I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful."

Catlett cared more about the social messages in her art than just how beautiful it looked. She said, "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." She was a feminist and an activist before these movements became widely known. She pursued an art career despite segregation and few female role models. She believed art could "prepare people for change" and be "educational and persuasive."

Catlett also knew her art inspired younger Black women. She said that being a Black woman sculptor "before was unthinkable." She added, "You can be black, a woman, a sculptor, a print-maker, a teacher, a mother, a grandmother, and keep a house. It takes a lot of doing, but you can do it. All you have to do is decide to do it."

Her series The Negro Woman (1946–1947) is a group of 15 linoleum cuts. These prints show the discrimination and racism faced by African American women at that time. The series also highlighted the strength and heroism of these women, including historical figures like Harriet Tubman.

Elizabeth Catlett's Own Words

No other field is closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.

"Art for me must develop from a necessity within my people. It must answer a question, or wake somebody up, or give a shove in the right direction — our liberation."

Selected Works

Here are some of Elizabeth Catlett's important works:

• Students Aspire (1977), located at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
• For My People portfolio (published 1992), by Limited Editions Club, New York.
• Ralph Ellison Memorial (2002), in Manhattan, New York.
• Torso (1985), a carving in mahogany. This sculpture shows a strong, working-class Black woman, similar to her other pieces that celebrate women's strength. Catlett liked using woods like cedar and mahogany because their natural colors looked like brown skin.

Collections

Elizabeth Catlett's art can be found in many museums and collections, including:

Images for kids

• 

  Sharecropper, 1952 or 1957

See also

In Spanish: Elizabeth Catlett para niños