by Lanita Brooks-Colbert
In 1988, the Guerilla Girls Art Collective posed a powerful question, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Despite women making up less than 5% of the artists represented in the Met’s Modern Art section at that time, 85% of the artwork depicting nudes were of women. This disparity did not go unnoticed. Women artists from the fifteenth century to the early 1900s and the second wave of feminism in the 60’s rose to the challenge, examining social and political contexts and reinterpreting art through a feminist lens. Lavinia Fontana, Italy’s first female professional artist in the fifteenth century, painted nude women, showcasing her skill at rendering the nude. Artemisia Gentileschi, a baroque painter famous for her Judith Slaying Holofernes series, featured strong, resilient women, pioneering feminist art. Their determination forced art historians to examine art through the lens of gender and power dynamics.
Christine de Pizan, a French court writer, wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405, a feminist text defending her sex, and so could be considered the first literary feminist. Art History idolized women depicted in art for their physical form, exemplified by the Madonna’s painted in the Renaissance. So, when and how did women artists use their works as activism? The philosophical and literary work of Mary Wollstonecraft written during the Enlightenment era contributed to growing feminist ideas that would eventually inform the art world. As the 19th century ended, representations of the “New Woman” appeared in art, and this shift was reflected in societal expectations and aspirations for women. Winifred Harper Cooley, in 1904, in The New Womanhood Magazine, referring to her white race, wrote that “She would perfect the race and leave her imprint upon immortality through her works” making it clear that Black women were not included in the birthing image of “The New Woman”. As more women artists exposed the systemic barriers faced by women artists and broke away from the traditional art historical narrative, legacy feminist artists of the 20th century emerged. Their works and voices created a new, more inclusive narrative supported by their fierce commitment to social and political equality.
Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a large-scale multi-media installation, now owned by the Brooklyn Museum, is a powerful statement on feminist art, celebrating women’s achievements, granting her the title of founder of feminist art in the twentieth century. Barbara Kruger, known for her bold and provocative photomontages often addresses themes of power through the female gaze, demanding commentary. Then, there is Elizabeth Catlett. Do we go from the long history of feminism in the arts to Catlett? How can we present the why and who and not include Elizabeth Catlett, a visionary figure in Black feminism and art? Viewing the Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was surreal and demanding. The Brooklyn Museum exhibit was just the beginning of understanding and appreciating the full scope of her years of groundbreaking work undertaken by Black scholars and institutions who supported Catlett’s career during her lifetime and after. The National Gallery Art exhibit brought it full circle.
Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) was a distinguished painter, printmaker, sculptor, educator, revolutionary, and global artist-activist. She was also a prominent advocate for the African American experience. Catlett used her voice and fearless tenacity to create work that advocated for social justice and equality for women while telling their stories. Her work demands that you think about women and how they take up space and own it. All her works intentionally propelled a sense of purpose, utilizing shapes, bronze, clay, and wood materials, creating an aching tenderness for the black woman’s strength and occupancy of space, as shown in her painting, Working Woman. Catlett drew on various influences, from African art and German expressionism to American and Mexican modernism. This collection of paintings, prints, and sculptures reflects her beliefs and shows how they became a powerful tool for social change. In the seventy-five years of artistic production, Catlett revealed her versatility as an artist, an avowed feminist, and a deft formalist. Her ability to express her feminist beliefs through various media and styles is a testament to her artistic depth and commitment to her cause. Catlett’s Black Woman Series, (1946-1947), includes eighteen linocuts showing the effort to organize the Unorganized. Elizabeth Catlett’s poem I am a Negro Woman accompanies each print in the series, illustrating lines of resilience and resistance. The exhibit’s book describes Catlett as a social realist printmaker and sculptor using organic abstraction.
However, her commitment to the Black experience and revolutionary change stemmed from determined and passionate choices, guiding her art and politics through a Black feminist lens.
Born in Washington DC in 1915 during “Jim Crow,” Catlett died an artistic legacy in 2012 in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Catlett had an enlightening and robust art education. Her training began at Howard University under James Porter, the revered African American art history authority. Later, Catlett received a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of Iowa. She studied drawing and painting with Grant Wood and sculpture with Harry Stinson. While at UI, Catlett could not stay on campus, although she attended classes at the University of Iowa. Catlett graduated in 1940, one of three to earn the first Master of Fine Art from the university and the first African American woman to receive the degree. She studied ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and sculpture and lithography from Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York City after marrying black artist Charles White. As with Charles White, Catlett believed art must be integral to the struggle. It cannot simply mirror what is taking place. Catlett practiced this mantra in her work, materials choices, writing, and activism.
In 1946, Catlett received a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to study in Mexico. She accepted the grant partly because American Art was trending toward the abstract, and she was interested in art related to social themes. In Mexico, Catlett saw the same internationalism root in colonization. She divorced White and married Francisco Mora, mural painter and an activist with the Taller de Grafica Popular, a workshop dedicated to prints promoting leftist social causes and education. After an arrest in 1949 in Mexico City for participation in a railroad strike, Catlett was declared an “undesirable alien” and barred from entering the United States. In 1962, Catlett renounced her American citizenship and became a Mexican citizen, regaining her American citizenship in 2002 after the death of her husband, Francisco Mora.
Elizabeth Catlett, Sharecropper, 1946, oil on canvas, Collection of John and Hortense Russell. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo credit: Brooks-Colbert
Sharecropper, one of the linoleum cuts made at the TGP in Mexico City, is possibly her most famous work and is an excellent example of Catlett’s bold visual style due to both the crisp black lines, rich browns and green inks of the drawing. The halo of the hat brim and upward looking angle of the figure shows someone to be venerated, despite the poverty evidenced by the safety pin holding together his cloak. As in the terracotta sculpture Tired, Catlett chose not to inscribe trauma on the bodies of her female sculptural subjects. Instead, she portrayed them with compassion and attention to care. Art historian Dr. Mora J. Beauchamp Byrd teaches that Catlett’s sculptures not only bear witness to black womens’ survival but eloquently and insistently demand that we join her as we take in the significance of their expressive forms, luminous finishes, and substantial bodily presence. In the cedar wood sculpture Political Prisoner Catlett intentionally bound the female’s hands in manacles behind her instead of handcuffs in front as was done to Angela Davis, a political activist of the 1970s, as a symbol of Black Liberation Politics. Political Prisoner was inspired by the Freedom for Angela Davis poster, which Catlett created in Mexico, bound for California but held in storage in New York City.
For Catlett, art was never just for art’s sake. While she was committed to form, she felt a moral obligation to work in a style that would be legible to all. “Let us create the best art possible for the liberation of our beautiful Black people.” In May 1970, Catlett was denied a visa to enter the United States and speak at the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art but remained undeterred. Catlett delivered her speech from Mexico City on the phone. She stated, “I have been and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies.”