Adjusting Our Focus
Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)
Photographer: Charles White
Source: Private collection. © The Charles White Archives.
“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.”
Elizabeth Catlett was a sculptor, printmaker, and fine art educator whose work centered on the experiences of African American and Mexican women, as well as the working class. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she attended Dunbar High School before studying under Loïs Mailou Jones at Howard University, where she graduated cum laude in 1937. She then pursued her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, studying with painter Grant Wood and becoming the first African American person to earn an MFA from that university in 1940.
Catlett’s career as an educator was equally distinguished. She served as head of the art department at Dillard University and later led the sculpture department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma De México from 1959 until her retirement in 1976.
A pivotal moment in her artistic journey occurred in 1946 when she received a fellowship that enabled her to travel to Mexico. There, she created The Black Woman–a series of linoleum cut prints chronicling the history of African American women’s fight for democratic rights. The following year, she permanently relocated to Mexico City, later becoming a Mexican citizen.
Catlett’s art blends realism and abstraction, using clear lines and bold forms to communicate social messages. Through sculpture and printmaking, she explored themes of race, gender, and justice, ensuring that the stories of marginalized people were seen and remembered.
Explore More
- View her outdoor sculpture Students Aspire (1977) at Howard University, Lewis K. Downing Hall, 2300 6th Street NW.
- Visit the Exhibit Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, DC, 1900–2000 at the Anacostia Community Museum, 1901 Fort Place, SE, Washington, DC (March 23, 2024 – January 4, 2026).
- Visit the National Gallery of Art to see more than 150 of her creations in the traveling exhibit Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist (March 9 - July 6, 2025).
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African American Visual Arts
by
Call Number: N6538.N5 B47 2008ISBN: 0807832561Publication Date: 2009-01-01In African American Visual Arts Celeste-Marie Bernier introduces readers to the sheer diversity, range, and experimental nature of African American art and artists and considers their relationship to key motifs within black culture and black experience in North America. The book traces the major developments in African American visual culture from its beginnings in the ceramics and textiles of slave artisans to later contributions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to the fine arts and abstract expressionism, sculpture, installation art, video art, and computer graphics. Bernier analyzes the work of twenty-one artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, William Edmondson, Howardena Pindell, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Betye Saar, Horace Pippin, and Kara Walker. -
A Century of African American Art
by
Call Number: N6538.N5 C45 2004ISBN: 0813534569Publication Date: 2004-10-26Among the sixty-six represented in A Century of African American Art are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Osawa Tanner, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hale Woodruff. Lavishly illustrated with over one hundred color photographs, this book provides an important resource for the study of the works included in the Jones collection, the artists who created them, as well as the social and historical contexts that engendered them.
Exhibit
Book on Display: African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present by Celeste-Marie Bernier.
Book on display: A Century of African American Art by Amalia K. Amaki