Elizabeth Catlett: Belated Recognition for An Exiled Luminary

This is a tentative date for an officially unannounced exhibition - Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies.

The exhibition travels from the Brooklyn Museum, to the Mary Lee Cortlett (formerly the National Gallery of Art), and then to the Art Institute of Chicago.

A defining Black woman artist of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) has not received the mainstream art-world attention afforded many of her peers. The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, closes this gap with Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, an exhibition of over 200 works that gives this revolutionary artist and radical activist her due.

A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism.

Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Inspired by sources ranging from African sculpture to works by Barbara Hepworth and Käthe Kollwitz, Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Characterized by bold lines and voluptuous forms, her powerful work continues to speak directly to all those united in the fight against poverty, racism, and imperialism.

"They didn’t have Zoom back in 1970, so when Elizabeth Catlett was denied entry into the United States to address a conference of the Black Arts Movement — for which she was a leading inspiration, a kind of luminary in exile — she had to deliver her speech by telephone.

The government had stripped Catlett of her citizenship eight years earlier, deeming her an undesirable alien after she became a Mexican citizen in 1962 and following years of surveillance for her leftist politics in both countries. But this hardly chilled her drive. In Mexico City, where she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she worked with local feminist groups while hosting a stream of American visitors and receiving by mail the newspaper of the Black Panther Party.

She made some of her most famous art — responding to and refining popular iconography — during this time. The warm-toned cedar sculpture “Black Unity” (1968) depicts a fist from one side and two stylized faces in the manner of African masks, side by side, on the other. The bronze “Target Practice” (1970), made soon after the deaths of the Black Panther activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Chicago police raid, shows the bust of a Black man who stoically faces the viewer through a rifle’s cross hairs centered on his face."
-Siddhartha Mitter

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