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REMEMBER. RESIST. CREATE and FIGHT

A Black Revolutionary Artist's Prophetic Message Still Resonates Today

Elizabeth Catlett (1915 - 2012) is not just a towering figure in art - she is one of the most accomplished and essential American artists of the 20th century. A master sculptor, printmaker, and lifelong social activist, her work is in major collections like the Whitney and MoMA. She was the first student to earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in sculpture from the University of Iowa in 1940. And for nearly a century, she lived a creatively brilliant and politically resistant life, receiving numerous commissions, a Rosenwald Fellowship, and honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement awards. Catlett mentored generations of artists and remained committed to depicting the strength and struggles of Black American and Mexican communities, even after facing surveillance by the FBI, and being stripped of her U.S. citizenship and banned from returning to her homeland.

Now, the most comprehensive exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States, is traveling the East Coast. Co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, (NGA) Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, features more than 150 works, including well-known bronze, wooden, and terracotta sculptures, prints, rare paintings and drawings and important memorabilia. Organized chronologically and thematically, the show traces the trajectory of Catlett’s career and multidisciplinary practice, which draws on abstraction, American and Mexican modernism, and African art. The title comes from an impassioned speech Catlett gave in 1970, following a decade of exile from the United States in response to her political activism in Mexico. “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies,” Catlett said. Now on view at NGA through July 6, the show travels to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will be on view from August 30 – January 4, 2026.

Elizabeth Catlett in her studio

NGA Installation view of a mural of the young artist at work. Original photo details: Elizabeth Catlett in her studio, by Charles White. c. 1942. Black-and-white photograph,
© The Charles White Archives

Artwork Below: Elizabeth Catlett,
Roots, 1981, serigraph, 14/40
sheet: 14 x 19 3/4 in., From the Hampton University Museum Collection, Hampton, VA © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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The Most Important Retrospective of 2025

Roots

The show arrives at a moment of alarming resonance. As book bans target Black literature, DEI programs are rolled back, Black history is sanitized and suppressed, attacks on academic freedom grow, and First Amendment protections erode under the weight of manufactured outrage, Catlett’s work and legacy speak with renewed urgency: remember, resist, create with purpose, and fight for the stories that shape our truth. Her life is a rebuke to the forces - past and present - that have tried to shrink Black possibility. Therefore, she has become a mirror, a guide, and what African Diasporic communities affectionately call…“an Ancestor.” And Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All that it Implies has emerged as the most important retrospective of 2025!

Global Art + Activism at Howard University

Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915, into a family of educators. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents were born enslaved - a family legacy that influenced her art. After she was denied admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because she was Black, her mother convinced her to attend Howard University.

Catlett’s years at Howard, beginning in 1931, were transformative. In the book “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” Melanee C. Harvey said the school offered Catlett more than just technical instruction – it shaped the very foundation of her “aesthetic activism, anchored in a commitment to Black creative legacies and Black women” (p. 68). At a time when segregation policies barred many African American students from accessing museums and formal art training, Howard’s College of Fine Arts distinguished itself as a world-class hub of modern and contemporary art education. Its faculty - Loïs Mailou Jones, James A. Porter, and James Wells - were themselves, leading artists and scholars, and were also, along with Philosophy department chair, Alain Locke – key figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

Her education was further enriched by exhibitions mounted in Howard’s Gallery of Art, including works by canonical European artists such as Van Gogh and Vermeer. Exposure to Van Gogh’s impasto technique, in particular, ignited her enduring fascination with texture. There was also an Exhibition of Paintings by Negro Artists comprised of 65 paintings from private collections and the Harmon Foundation. Students studied Chicago Modernist, Archibald Motley, Jr., and Haitian perspectives from artists, Palmer Hayden, William E. Scott, Laura Wheeler Waring and William Johnson. She was also exposed to ‘racialized’ maternal figures, popular in the New Negro tradition. An entire semester in the fall of 1933 was devoted to African subjects and aesthetics.

In the 1932 Howard exhibition, Rare Negro Paintings, her work was featured alongside works by her professors. Outside the classroom, Catlett grew politically active: she joined the Liberal Club’s anti-war efforts and rose to vice president of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, where she pushed back against colorism and advocated for brown-skinned girls even though she, herself, could pass for white. Pressing social issues of the day and the treatment of African American mothers in the public discourse were always front and center.

“Howard placed her in one of the leading art and design programs defining pedagogy and art practice for American art,” Harvey wrote. (p. 70). Catlett graduated in 1935 with a B.S. in Art. Her MFA thesis sculpture at University of Iowa, Negro Mother and Child, won first place at the 1940 Chicago American Negro Exposition.

Artwork right: Elizabeth Catlett, Mother and Child, 1983, Mahagony, overall: 53 x 13 x 13 in., New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum purchase, Women's Volunteer Committee Fund, 83.71 © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Chicago + New York

Catlett’s years in Chicago and New York during the early 1940s were pivotal, not only for the development of her artistic voice but also for the lifelong relationships she formed with some of the most important figures in American art. In Chicago she entered a dynamic art world anchored by the thriving community of Black artists in Bronzeville and major institutions like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which had emerged as a rare interracial training ground. There, she connected with Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles White - modern masters in their own right - whose work and political vision paralleled hers.

After marrying White in 1941, the couple relocated to New York in 1942. She deepened her artistic practice, studying lithography, abstraction and linocut. Her circle included Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Robert Blackburn, and poet Gwendolyn Bennett - visionaries whose names, in a just art world, would stand alongside Picasso or Monet. During these war years, as Black Americans were asked to fight for freedoms they were denied at home, Catlett’s work grew more politically charged as she confronted the gap between American ideals and Black realities.

Artwork above (detail): Elizabeth Catlett, Red Cross Woman (Nurse), c. 1944 gouache on paper sheet: 20 1/2 x 20 in., From the Hampton University Museum Collection, Hampton, VA © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Artwork below: Elizabeth Catlett, Indian Woman, 1973, black marble, 9 x 6 x 7 in., Courtesy of Laura and Richard Parsons © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photocredit: Roz Akin, New York

Mexico

Firmas para la Paz

In 1946, Catlett left New York for Mexico on a Rosenwald Fellowship to produce a body of work about the lives of Black women. This project evolved into her landmark, iconic series, The Black Woman, (1946–1947) - featured in the show. And what started as a temporary residency, became a permanent relocation - artistically, politically, and spiritually. In Mexico City, now divorced, she joined the famed Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), a collective of socially engaged printmakers known for their powerful graphic art that championed laborers, peasants, and revolutionary ideals. There, she deepened her commitment to linocut and woodcut techniques and adapted traditional Mexican print methods - creating works that could circulate widely, provoke thought, and nourish pride.

She married fellow artist Francisco Mora, with whom she had three sons. And after more than a decade, became a Mexican citizen in 1962, after facing political persecution in the U.S. for her leftist ties. Although she was labeled "unAmerican," and denied a U.S. reentry visa during the McCarthy era, she remained deeply engaged with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, supporting U.S. Black liberation causes through her art, correspondence, and solidarity.

Catlett's work expanded to embrace the transnational nature of oppression...and of solidarity. Her prints circulated among civil rights activists, and her home became a cultural hub for visiting Black American artists. Deeply immersed in Mexican culture, she continued to create art in unity with African Americans while also producing powerful works addressing Mexican laborers, Indigenous communities, and the global working poor.

Artwork above: Elizabeth Catlett, Firmas para la Paz, 1952 linocut image: 12 5/16 x 16 9/16 in. Peter Schneider and Susan DeJarnatt © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Both images licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Elizabeth Catlett, Woman with Oranges, 1958, 21 x 17 in.) From the Hampton University Museum Collection, Hampton, VA © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Elizabeth Catlett Sharecropper, 1946, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 22 1/2 in., Collection of John and Hortense Russell © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photocredit: Wes Magyar

Elizabeth Catlett, Sharecropper (male), 1945 linocut 4 1/4 x 5 3/4 in., sheet: 9 1/2 x 12 1/4 in., Williams College Museum of Art, Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Installation shot from The Black Woman series. ...Special houses..." 1946. This print addresses the issue of segregated housing and the experiences of African Americans in crowded northern cities.

Black Power + Redemption + Legacy

Angela Libre

“I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples,” Catlett told Ebony magazine in 1970. Fusing her inspirations, she produced a new style that was rooted in Mexican art traditions, and shaped by the Black American experience. A Black Revolutionary Artist is therefore, a beautiful symphony of the sculptural clarity of African form, the didactic punch of Mexican printmaking, and the unapologetic pride of Black power!

Catlett created Angela Libre to proclaim solidarity with the activist during her incarceration. The words “Angela Libre” (“Free Angela”) echo the global campaign to demand Angela Davis’s release. The bold “Kool-aid colors” reference the Black Arts Movement tradition and COBRA manifesto that emphasized a “Black aesthetic" - rhythmic patterns, and messages of empowerment. Similarly, Malcolm Speaks for Us, conveys that women, too, are part of Malcolm X's message of Black liberation. Homage to My Young Black Sisters examines intersectional feminism and references historical African and Mesoamerican sculpture.

It was the Studio Museum in Harlem that eventually helped facilitate Catlett's return to the U.S. in 1971, affirming her status as a bridge between the African American freedom struggle and global movements for justice. In 2001, the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) awarded her an honorary doctorate, formally acknowledging both her extraordinary achievements in art and activism - and the institution’s past injustice in denying her admission. The gesture was a long-overdue recognition of her legacy and the barriers she had defiantly overcome.

A Black Revolutionary Artist reminds us that Elizabeth Catlett was not given a place in the canon...she carved one out with discipline, talent, and fire. This exhibition resonates so powerfully today, not just because beauty of the work, but also the clarity of its moral vision. Catlett had the courage to reflect her people - regardless of the systems against them - with dignity, depth, and with revolutionary love.

Artwork above: Elizabeth Catlett, Angela Libre, 1972 lithograph in color on silver foil sheet: 22 x 25 1/2 in. Private Collection © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photocredit: Neil Boyd Photography

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