Installation view of “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” including Target Practice, Political Prisoner, and Black Unity (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)
ELIZABETH CATLETT: A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY AND ALL THAT IT IMPLIES
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, fourth floor
Through January 19, $14-$20 ($17-$25 including “Solid Gold”)
www.brooklynmuseum.org
“Unfortunately, for me, I was refused [a visa to enter the United States] on the grounds that, as a foreigner, there was a possibility I would interfere in social or political problems, and thus, I constituted a threat to the well-being of the United States of America,” Washington, DC-born artist Elizabeth Catlett said in 1970. “To the degree and in the proportion that the United States constitute a threat to Black People, to that degree and more, do I hope I have earned that honor. For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!”
This is the last weekend to see “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” at the Brooklyn Museum, a revelatory show that traces Catlett’s extraordinary career as an artist, teacher, and activist. Divided into ten sections, including “I Am the Black Woman,” “Roots and Awakening,” “Motherhood and Family,” and “The Black Woman Speaks,” the exhibit features more than two hundred objects, from sculpture, painting, and drawing to linocuts, lithographs, political posters, and ephemera (documents, archival photographs, scrapbooks, postcards, pamphlets).
Elizabeth Catlett, three versions of Sharecropper (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)
Born in 1915, Catlett earned degrees from Howard and the University of Iowa, studying with Loïs Mailou Jones, James A. Porter, James Lesesne Wells, Grant Wood, H. W. Janson, and Henry Stinson. In 1946, her Rosenwald Fellowship, to work on a “series of lithographs, paintings, and sculptures on the role of the Negro woman in the fight for democratic rights in the history of America,” led her to Mexico, where she joined the revolutionary art collective Taller de Gráfica Popular, became a Mexican citizen, and married artist Francisco “Pancho” Mora, her partner for fifty-five years.
Catlett, known informally as Betty, amassed a remarkable output that is wonderfully organized by Dalila Scruggs of the Smithsonian, Catherine Morris of the Brooklyn Museum, and Mary Lee Corlett of the National Gallery, spread across numerous rooms. Among the works to watch out for are poignant oil on canvas and linocut renderings of Sharecropper, perhaps her most famous image; the “I Am the Black Woman” series, which unfolds in a poetic narrative; a trio of heads on a horizontal plinth; several heart-wrenching depictions of a mother and child; Target Practice, a bronze bust of a head with a circular target in front of it; Black Unity, a cedar sculpture with two faces on one side and a large, clenched fist on the other; a foil screenprint and life-size sculpture of Angela Davis, each bursting with shocking color; bronze maquettes for public art statues of Mahalia Jackson and Sojourner Truth; and the stunning Floating Family, created for the Chicago Public Library, in which a mother and daughter, carved from the trunk of a primavera tree, reach out and join hands, floating horizontally so people can walk under them. There are also three videos of her at work.
In her “Statement of Plan” for the Rosenwald Fellowship, Catlett wrote, “Negro women in America have long suffered under the double handicap of race and sex. Because of subtle American propaganda in the movies, radio and stage, they have come to be generally regarded as good cooks, housemaids and nurses and little else. At this time when we are fighting an all out war against tyranny and oppression, it is extremely important that the picture of Negro women as participants in this fight, throughout the history of America, be sharply drawn. . . . It is my earnest desire to portray this history of Negro womanhood in lithography, painting and sculpture and to send these portrayals to Negro and white colleges so that young men and women, especially in the south, can get some idea of the contributions of Negro American women.”
EInstallation view of “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” including Bather, Floating Family, Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and Sojourner (photo by Paula Abreu Pita)
Catlett — who died in 2012 in her home studio in Cuernavaca at the age of ninety-six and is survived by three sons, ten grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren — concluded her Rosenwald statement by explaining, “As to my future plans, I want to establish myself as an artist so that I can develop, as I feel that my greatest contribution to the forward progress of the Negro can be made in this field. The opportunity to devote one year to painting and sculpture would be of extreme importance in realizing this aim.”
As “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” displays, Catlett made the most of that opportunity, leaving behind a legacy of extreme importance.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]