{"id":218195,"date":"2025-09-11T12:56:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T12:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/218195\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T12:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T12:56:13","slug":"a-revolutionary-life-chicago-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/218195\/","title":{"rendered":"A revolutionary life – Chicago Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Catlett (1915\u20132012) was a revolutionary printmaker, sculptor, and painter with a body of work spanning six-plus decades. This fall, the Art Institute of Chicago presents a long-overdue retrospective of her work across mediums, adapted from a curation by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Beginning with her earliest work in the 1940s, the exhibit walks visitors through her political activism and her realist depictions of the people around her, her sculpture and the shifts in her use of shading, all against a baby blue backdrop. The viewer sees Catlett come into her intentions as an artist and distinctive style throughout mediums: while her prints became more and more intricate, her sculptural works became more abstract. Most notably, Catlett revisited her prints over decades, experimenting with different colorways and restyling them into new contexts.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I am a woman and I know how a woman feels in body and mind, I sculpt, draw, and print women, generally black women,\u201d Catlett said<\/a> in 1983. \u201cMany of my sculptures and prints deal with maternity because I am a mother and a grandmother. Once in a while I do men because I love my husband and my sons, I share their sorrows and joys, and I fear for them in the unsettled world of today.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AElizabeth Catlett. Harlem Woman, 1992
\u00a02024 Mora-Catlett Family\/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY<\/p>\n

Born in Washington, D.C. and determined to become an artist from a young age, Catlett was accepted into her dream art program, Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Institute of Technology); her admission was rescinded when they learned she was Black. She enrolled instead at Howard University in 1931, where she studied under leading figures in the Black arts scene: printmaker James Lesesne Wells and painters Lo\u00efs Mailou Jones and James A. Porter. It was Porter who introduced her to the Mexican muralist movement, and it was the Howard University Art Gallery where she first encountered African sculpture, both of which shaped her painting and sculptural practices. (The Art Institute quotes Catlett alongside an array of her later sculptural works: \u201cI am impressed by the use of form to express emotion; by the simplification towards abstraction; by the life and vitality achieved through form relations. All African art interests me. I see such force, such life. I love it!\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Post graduation, she worked for two years as a public school teacher, which left her with no time to practice her own art. She entered an MFA program at the University of Iowa, where she studied painting with Grant Wood of recent American Gothic fame. He instructed her<\/a> to \u201ctake as her subject what she knew best,\u201d and to constantly work and rework her images, two sentiments that remained central to her lifelong art practice. When she showed interest in sculpture, Wood encouraged her to pursue it. In 1940, Catlett became the first Black woman to earn an MFA from the school.<\/p>\n

Catlett lived in Chicago for the summer of 1941, studying ceramics at the Art Institute and lithography at the South Side Community Art Center. She moved to New York while briefly married to Charles White, continuing her lithography study and teaching sewing and sculpture to working-class women at Harlem\u2019s George Washington Carver School.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Working at Carver School was deeply influential, solidifying her belief that art should be public and for the people. The Art Institute quotes her below the sculpture Floating Family (1995\u201396), commissioned by the Chicago Public Library: \u201cArt in public places is only valid when it has some relationship to the community. . . . It is not good enough to be merely functional or even beautiful. We must meet the psychological and social needs of our people.\u201d She was excited about the sculpture\u2019s public library placement, \u201cabout the prospect of people sitting there,\u201d she said, \u201cBlack people sitting in that building, reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AElizabeth Catlett. The Black Woman Speaks, 1970
\u00a9 2024 Mora-Catlett Family\/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Gregory R. Staley<\/p>\n

She often depicted her students in her lithography and began a series funded by a Rosenwald fellowship\u2014what became \u201cThe Black Woman,\u201d her 15-part narrative epic of Black womanhood in the U.S. across space and time. Predictably, as a teacher, she had little spare time to work on it. So Catlett moved to Mexico, drawn by the revolutionary mural and print art being created there. She joined the leftist print collective Taller de Gr\u00e1fica Popular (TGP), which produced political prints for mass distribution. Catlett created over 70 prints<\/a> with the TGP, depicting Black and Mexican experiences alike.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In response to her political subject matter and leftist associations, the U.S. declared Catlett an \u201cundesirable alien.\u201d She gained Mexican citizenship in 1962, and her U.S. citizenship was revoked. Catlett was barred from entry to the U.S. through the millennium with minimal exceptions, even to visit exhibitions of her own work, until her citizenship was reinstated in 2002 due to a letter-writing campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She turned her focus towards printmaking in the 1940s and \u201950s during her three sons\u2019 early childhoods. Catlett began to depict the lives and struggles of Mexican workers, mothers, and children, creating her most well-known print, Sharecropper (1952\/1970). While the initial version was black-and-white, she continued to experiment with it in color decades later. Catlett also spoke to larger systems of oppression, illustrating the violence and exploitation of U.S. imperialism with Alto a la agresi\u00f3n (1954). She combined this with Chile I (1980) and Chile II (1982) to create the expansive Central America Says No! (1986) later on. \u201cI am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples,\u201d she told Ebony magazine<\/a> in a 1970 article.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Catlett innovated any medium and style she touched. In Vendedora de peri\u00f3dicos (1958\/75), she collaged Mexican newspapers into a linocut print. Repeated faces express multiplicity and collectivity in Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969) and Angela Libre (1972). The sculpture The Black Woman Speaks (1970) depicts a rounded female face, with an abstract sun and moon as the ear. Man (1975) combines woodcut and linocut, drawing from both African geometric abstraction and Mesoamerican figure motifs. Harlem Woman (1992) collages fabric into a color lithograph. She never ceased to be inventive in all that she did.<\/p>\n

Catlett was a revolutionary artist\u2014in politics, subject matter, and artistic method\u2014throughout her career. The exhibition\u2019s title specifically pulls from Catlett\u2019s speech to the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art, held at Northwestern University in 1970. Her U.S. citizenship revoked and visa denied, she spoke to the crowd over the phone: \u201cI have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Catlett: \u201cA Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies\u201d<\/strong>
Through 1\/4: Fri\u2013Mon and Wed 11 AM\u20135 PM, Thu 11 AM\u20138 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu\/exhibitions\/10220\/elizabeth-catlett-a-black-revolutionary-artist-and-all-that-it-implies<\/a>, adults $20\u201332, seniors 65+, students, and teens 14\u201317 $14\u201326, children under 14 and Chicago teens 14\u201317 free; Illinois residents get in free Thursdays 5\u20138 PM through 9\/25\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tAugust 15, 2025\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Catlett (1915\u20132012) was a revolutionary printmaker, sculptor, and painter with a body of work spanning six-plus decades.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":218196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[119154,960,119155,117857,5386,1818,4289,77591,119156],"class_list":{"0":"post-218195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-art-institute-of-chicago","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-elizabeth-catlett","11":"tag-fall-arts-2025","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-illinois","14":"tag-listings","15":"tag-reader-recommended","16":"tag-south-side-community-art-center"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115185778287014649","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}