Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)

October is National Art and Humanity Month, and there's no better way to celebrate that than to honor a great 20th century sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett.

"Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett used her art to advocate for social change in both the U.S. and her adopted country of Mexico for almost three-quarters of a century. 

The granddaughter of former slaves, Catlett was raised in Washington, D.C. Her father died before she was born and her mother held several jobs to raise three children. Refused admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, Catlett enrolled at Howard University.

In 1946, a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation enabled Catlett to move to Mexico City with her husband, printmaker Charles White. There she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an influential and political group of printmakers. At the Taller, Catlett met the Mexican artist Francisco Mora, whom she married after divorcing White and with whom she had three sons.

Catlett taught at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1958 until her retirement in 1976, producing realistic and highly stylized two- and three-dimensional figures. Her subjects ranged from tender maternal images to confrontational symbols of the Black Power movement, to portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and the writer Phyllis Wheatley."

Reference

National Museum of Women of the Arts