Elizabeth Catlett was an African American sculptor, printmaker, and Civil Rights activist born on April 15, 1919, in Washington, DC. In 1932 she earned a scholarship to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, but it was revoked when the institute learned she was Black.[1] Instead, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC, to study textile design under African American artists Loïs Mailou Jones, James Porter, and James Herring. She changed her major to painting after her first year and graduated cum laude in 1937. Catlett worked on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and taught in Durham, North Carolina, for two years. In 1940 she became the first student to earn an MFA from the State University of Iowa (now University of Iowa) in Iowa City[2], where she studied painting under Grant Wood.
Catlett enrolled in a ceramics course at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she met her first husband, Charles White. She taught at Prairie View A&M University in Texas and Dillard University in New Orleans, and chaired the art department at the latter. She moved to New York to study sculpture under the Belarusian-born French-naturalized artist Ossip Zadkine and then joined her husband to teach art at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia. In 1944 she taught at the George Washington Carver School in New York, and in 1946 a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship took her to Mexico. During that fellowship she created a series of fifteen linocuts titled Negro Woman, demonstrating her personal emphasis on depicting Black women. Also in 1946 she divorced White, and the following year Catlett married Mexican painter and printmaker Francisco Mora. She taught sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México until she retired in 1976. When she became a Mexican citizen in 1962, the US State Department classified her as an “undesirable alien.”[3] The US government would not issue her a visa to re-enter the country until 1971, when she was exhibiting at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York.
Catlett lived in Mexico until her death in 2012.
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Notes
[1] Hills and Renn 2005; Macklin 2001.
[2] Macklin 2001.
[3] Ibid.
References
Hills, Patricia, and Melissa Renn. 2005. “Elizabeth Catlett.” In Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery.
Logan, Fern. 2001. The Artist Portrait Series: Images of Contemporary African American Artists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Macklin, A.D. 2001. A Biological History of African-American Artists, A–Z. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Sims, Lowery Stokes. 2015. Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications.
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