The Brooklyn Rail

A number of years ago, I happened upon a small, unassuming lithograph that deeply moved me. It depicted a young, Black mother cradling her arm protectively around her cherubic, solemn-faced baby, shielding him from what seem to be the dangers of the world. Her own face appears determined, but tired, with the hood the mother wears throwing shadows over her downcast eyes. The two figures encompass nearly the entire frame, and there is a sculptural quality to their depiction. In emotion, rendering, and subject matter, I was reminded of Käthe Kollwitz, the revolutionary political printmaker of early twentieth-century Germany. But this striking print, Mother and Child (1944), was the work of Elizabeth Catlett, an artist with whom I was unfamiliar. I set out to learn more about Catlett and was surprised to find relatively scant material, and few places where I could see more of her work. There seemed to be an erasure.

With Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, an expansive, posthumous retrospective now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, one hopes that a corrective to this bowdlerization has arrived. Catlett (1915–2012), like Kollwitz before her, intertwined her work as an artist—primarily in sculpture and printmaking—with a fierce activist practice that was informed by a strong sense of social justice. Throughout her life, she passionately worked for women’s rights, Black liberation in the United States, and the plight of Mexican workers in Mexico. After essentially being exiled by the United States for over a decade due to her radical political beliefs, Mexico became her adopted home, where she primarily lived for over sixty years, marrying there and raising three sons.

Mother and Child is one of Catlett’s many prints on view in the exhibition. She arrived in Mexico in 1946 to study printmaking at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a renowned and politically active print collective in Mexico City. By that time, she was already highly trained, having studied art at Howard University before receiving the United States’ first awarded MFA degree from the University of Iowa. Since high school, Catlett had been politically active, organizing anti-lynching protests as a teenager, and after university she lived in Harlem for four years, teaching and organizing around leftist and anti-fascist causes. She had developed an interest in printmaking during an earlier stint at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago (she’d also studied ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago around the same time), and was gratified to have landed at an institution in Mexico that shared her dual interests in printmaking and workers’ rights. The exhibition opens with a number of Catlett’s prints from these early years, including her suite of fifteen linocut prints entitled “The Black Woman” (1946–47), which remains one of her best known bodies of work. The prints develop a compacted history of Black women’s experiences in the United States coupled with eloquent titles which, when grouped as a whole, compose a poem. A representative print from the series, I Have Given the World My Songs (1947), depicts a Black woman playing a guitar at the foreground of the image, while a violent scene of another Black figure being attacked by a white one, before a white cross, unfolds in the background. The imagery is potent, and Catlett returned to this and other scenes from “The Black Woman” later in her career.

A distinctive feature of I Have Given the World My Songs is the way in which the form of the woman’s body echoes the undulations of the guitar she plays, a moment in Catlett’s developing print practice that presages the sculptural work she would soon develop concurrently. Instances of Catlett’s formal rigor in her prints, suggesting the three-dimensional, occur throughout. A highlight of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which was co-organized by curator Catherine Morris, along with Dalila Scruggs of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Mary Lee Corlett of the National Gallery of Art, is witnessing how Catlett’s sculpture unfolded alongside her printmaking, and how the two differing media informed each other. Tired (1946), a small terracotta sculpture of a Black woman sitting hunched, hands clasped between knees, is a poignant meditation on the fatigues of everyday life that are universally understood, and the compassion for it which is often withheld, especially from Black women. As Catlett’s career progressed, her sculpture became ever more sophisticated, and she was bold in choice of material, becoming adept in forming sculpture from terracotta, bronze, marble, limestone, and especially, wood. The final two galleries of the exhibition are largely given over to Catlett’s multifaceted sculpture, which is both a revelation and a selection that affords the audience a broad scope of her interests.

Black Unity (1968) is one such standout. A squat piece that sits on a pedestal, the cedar wood object depicts two faces pressed together when a viewer faces it head on, but morphs into an upraised fist—a symbol of solidarity among Black activists, especially during the Civil Rights Movement in the US during the sixties and early seventies—as one circles the sculpture. The freedom to circumnavigate her 3D works is important, as Catlett frequently made cunning use of her medium; both the backs and the fronts of her sculptural works were often of equal importance. Political Prisoner (1971), another sculpture in cedar wood, portrays a young woman wearing a skirt the colors of the Black Liberation flag, with hands behind her back and her imploring face held to the sky. As one approaches the reverse side, her chained hands—a gut punch of a detail—come into view. Catlett, who had actively organized on behalf of Angela Davis—who was on trial the year after this sculpture was made—likely had Davis in mind when making the work.

With more than two hundred works on view, A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is a sprawling show that rewards slow looking and repeated visits to absorb Catlett’s artistic prowess as well as her intellectual rigor. An aversion to her radical politics, along with structural racism, may have contributed to a certain degree of disregard for the extensive body of work she created. But it is a body of work that deserves the scrutiny and attention it is now being afforded, and places Catlett among the most dexterous and sensitive American political artists of the twentieth century.