Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary and All That It Implies assumes the prodigious task of showcasing nearly 50 years of the prolific artist’s dynamic artwork and abundant political offerings.
Catlett’s The Negro Woman series, later renamed The Black Woman, opens the exhibition; 15 prints that confront the role of Black women in American society are displayed together for the first time since 1947. In the black and white prints, Black women are cleaning, studying, sowing the fields, playing music, and organizing politically. Catlett sets forth a narrative of Black womanhood in the United States, in which we have always labored in domestic, agricultural, political, and artistic settings. Concurrent with The Black Woman series, the artist became a member of Taller de Gráfica Popular (the People’s Graphic Workshop/TGP) in Mexico, where she relocated in 1947. The radical printmaking workshop was dedicated to widely distributing artwork that uplifted the anti-imperialist and communist ethos of the Mexican Revolution and its political afterlives. Catlett joined TGP in Mexico City about a decade after its founding; in a community with Mexican leftists committed to global revolutionary ideals, she brought a transnational Black feminist perspective to the group.
In 1946 to 1947, Catlett also worked on terracotta sculptures inspired by artistic practices of Indigenous communities in Mexico stretching back to the Olmec period. “Tired” (1946) depicts a Black woman sitting down and resting while looking upward. The figure’s need for rest is contextualized by prints of the same period in which Black women are constantly laboring. In 1952, she carved an image of a Black woman wearing a wide-brim straw hat into a linoleum plate and titled it “Sharecropper.” Fellow TGP artist José Sanchez was the first to print the now iconic portrait, but Catlett continued to reprint it for decades while experimenting with colors. The prints reveal the double duty Black women were expected to perform while working in the field and the home. The plight of the sharecropper resonated with Mexican leftists whose political consciousness recognized the exploitation of the campesino. In “Campesinos Mexicanos,” a poor laborer shares his corn with two children, evoking the scarcity-influenced yet communal ethics pervasive in the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous rural laborers.
A helpful didactic note in the exhibition explains that El Pueblo, the people/ community/village, is an organizing principle for the TGP artists who assumed a duty to represent the lives of marginalized people in their art as part of a greater liberatory project. Catlett’s vision of El Pueblo in her artwork honors working-class Black and Indigenous peoples on both sides of the US/Mexico border. In “Woman with Oranges” (1958), a brown woman wearing a rebozo (a long scarf covering the heads and shoulders of Mexican women) holds citrus fruits that signify the Mexican farmers who grow much of the world’s citrus, an essential ingredient in Mexican cuisine. Another motif is literacy, a concept important to African American emancipatory histories as well as the constitution of the Mexican Revolution, which enshrined the right to public education. In “Alfabetización” (Literacy) (1953), three Indigenous women wearing rebozos sit in a circle; two listen carefully as their teacher (maestra) reads to them from a book.
The prints Catlett created with her TGP comrades were enormously influential to the Mexican leftist visual landscape of the time and were reprinted in magazines and distributed widely. Through her collaborations, such as Guillermo Rodríguez Camacho’s printed portrait of W.E.B DuBois (1953–54) and Celia Calderon’s of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1950), it becomes apparent that Catlett’s influence introduced her Mexican comrades to African American luminaries. This cross-cultural artistic pollination is evidenced, too, in collaborations with fellow TGP member and her husband, Francisco Mora. They often reinterpreted each other’s work and collaboratively produced prints utilizing symbols from the Mexican Revolution.
The exhibition proceeds chronologically to the 1960s–’70s Civil Rights and Black Power era: bright pops of color across this gallery are a warm contrast to the mainly black and white prints of the decade prior. A 1969 print, “Malcolm X Speaks for Us,” depicts the faces of Black women turning toward an image of the Black Power icon himself — emphasizing the titular notion that Black women see their voices echoed in Malcolm X’s activism. Catlett created “Angela Libre” (Free Angela) (1972) the same year that Davis was acquitted of all charges in a case related to a prison guard’s death: six images of the political activist’s face and afro in different bold “koolaid colors” (associated with Black Arts Movement aesthetics) are printed on silver foil.
Nearby is “Political Prisoner” (1971), a sculpture of a Black woman with her arms linked behind her back and the Pan-African colors red, black, and green in the center, installed in front of a blown-up wall image of Davis being arrested. Displayed together, these works convey Catlett’s profound respect for Davis that she channeled into her art as well as her political organizing for the latter’s freedom. “Black Unity” (1969), a massive fist carved in cedar, further communicates the artist’s commitment to Black liberation, while other works affirm quieter forms of women’s resistance: “Links Together” (1996) portrays three Black women connected by their hands and symbolic stitching and weaving of the decorative cloth patterns on their shirts. In “Gossip” (2005), two Black women are deeply engaged in a conversation with one another — an oft-dismissed method of women’s empowerment.
Radical artists in the countercultural 1960s often encouraged each other to draw on ancestral roots, whether they be African or Mesoamerican, as a decolonial aesthetic strategy. One display most illustrative of this notion is a large white platform filled with around 14 sculptures of varying wood, ceramic, and stone materials showing abstract figures in different poses. Many of the sculptures evoke the style of African masks carved into materials associated with the Mesoamerican tradition and native to Mexico. On the platform is “Homage to My Young Black Sisters,” a red cedar sculpture with unique historical significance: the figure’s stretched Black Power fist and the revelatory title signal the extension of Catlett’s solidarity with younger generations of Black women continuing the liberation struggle.
Interactive spaces for immersion, play, and reflection follow the presentation of Catlett’s immense oeuvre. An enlarged photograph of her studio in Cuernavaca is juxtaposed with a video of her working in her studio and a display case containing different carving tools she used. An installation of different stone, wood, and metal samples, as well as a three-dimensional replica of her “Cabeza/ Head”(2009), provide opportunities to physically touch the materials and shapes that defined her sculptural practice. A visual poetry activity in the gallery includes imagery from Catlett’s work reproduced as magnets that can be moved into different formations, much like the visual repetition in her printmaking practice.
The final gallery is dedicated to Catlett’s public art practice, including original works and representations of public art from cities such as Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. Suspended from the ceiling, a mother and daughter hold hands in “Floating Family” (1995–96). The sculpture, carved from Mexican primavera wood, is normally in its home at the Chicago Public Library but was loaned for the traveling retrospective. Although their outstretched arms indicate distance between them, the mother and daughter hold tight to one another in perpetuity. The sense of intergenerational continuity and radical kinship radiating from the work is a testament to Catlett’s deep, abiding love for community that continued throughout her life.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary and All That It Implies continues at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn) through January 19, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Dalila Scruggs, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, with Curatorial Assistant Rashieda Witter. It was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.
