At this time when we are fighting an all out war against tyranny and oppression, it is extremely important that the picture of Negro women . . . be sharply drawn.
—Elizabeth Catlett, 1945 application for Rosenwald fellowship
On the April afternoon that I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC to celebrate the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, I waded through a sea of more than ten thousand peaceful protesters demonstrating outrage against Donald Trump. That day, like many others, felt marked by the question of revolution in the United States as I shouldered the leaden awareness that fascism is deepening its roots beneath us. And in it, what will be your role? I heard Catlett ask as I washed ashore.
Containing more than 150 artworks, the retrospective animates the magnitude of Elizabeth Catlett’s oeuvre, telling the story of her career with unique attention to how she built it alongside her abiding commitment to Black, leftist, and feminist principles. Spanning more than seven decades in scope, Catlett’s sculpture, prints, paintings, and drawings offer modes of countercultural propaganda that unravel oppressive racist and sexist culture. Curators Dalila Scruggs, Catherine Morris, and Mary Lee Corlett, assisted by Rashieda Witter and Carla Forbes, successfully eradicate any historical uncertainty that Catlett lived as a revolutionary artist, drawing public discourse to her sharp and direct critiques of colonialism, the United States, and white supremacy.
Though the political dimensions of her work command the focus of the exhibit, Catlett’s technical prowess drew my attention before I even entered the first gallery. Some of her most notable public artworks, each exalting people and their bodies, face the show’s entrance and exit. The artist’s deliberate gestures shape raw, natural material to call forward the essence of human form living within them, a delicate exchange predicated on intimate knowledge of flesh and ecology. I was immediately captivated, eyes wide and mouth agape as I moved through the hall. This is not the kind of work you view passively. I leaned in close to catch the sheen of the polished Mexican primavera-wood surface of Floating Family (1995–96), a sculpture of a mother and daughter clasping one another as they soar overhead, before I curled backward, chin up, to fully absorb the rich expressions of maternal love, rage, fear, grief. I paused in front of Relief Study (Sculptural Sketch of People of Atlanta) (1989–90), a plaster study of a section of bronze installed in Atlanta’s City Hall. The study bears the diverse faces of local citizens, designed to remind legislators and politicians to whom they are accountable. My eyes darted between the study and a juxtaposed photo of the full-scale bronze relief. While modest in comparison to the bronze statues of Mahalia Jackson and Sojourner Truth nearby, Relief Study reckons with an entangled art and politics. Catlett uses the former to hold the latter to task, opening the door for subsequent generations of Black revolutionary artists to do the same. The entry hall is thick with these warm invitations, commemorative public artworks Catlett crafted for many cities, from Chicago to Cuernavaca. She had special regard for public art, elevated in her spirit by its ties to community and intended permanence. The monumental statues stand guard at the doorway into and out of the artist’s internal world.
Elizabeth Catlett, I am the Negro Woman, 1947. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Art by Women Collection, Gift of Linda Lee Alter. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The entrance hall arches into a gallery dappled with ochre accents on the walls and pedestals carrying works Catlett completed during her first Rosenwald fellowship in Mexico City in 1946. Here I found the artwork that had first introduced me to Catlett years prior: I Have Given the World My Songs (I Have Made Music for the World) (1947). In it, an unnamed female guitarist is foregrounded in deep contrast with a blue-washed scene of racial terror haunting her shoulder. Catlett sketches both pain and relief into the woman’s expression. The print, smaller than my open hand, undulates with the electric energy of Black singer-songwriters like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Mama Thornton, early pioneers in American music in the thirties and forties whose songs were co-opted by white artists such as Elvis to create popular (and profitable) styles like rock and roll. In the presence of I Have Given the World My Songs, I felt the centuries peel back. The gospel of the blues took me into a timeless place where ancestors gyrate and shake and rock their hips back and forth to the lament of a woman who has nothing left but surrender. Generations later, Black female artists such as Ntozake Shange would still be calling out for somebody/anybody to sing a Black girl’s song, echoing Catlett’s demand to recognize Black women’s brilliance—our innovations toward care, memory, and survival. And still, seventy-eight years later, while Black women’s labor produces a great deal of the culture we live in, that same culture dares to fester with regular political and interpersonal attacks on Black women, demanding silence in response. The print suggests to me that it is no less than a miracle that Black women remain committed to the practice of pouring songs into the world, ones we made to give a name to our blues.
I Have Given the World My Songs is one of fifteen prints in the mesmerizing series The Negro Woman (1946-47), which Catlett renamed The Black Woman in 1989. In it, each title clings to the next, welding linocut prints into a steely poem, a montage of familiar scenes. Black women’s labor and exploitation are sharply drawn through Catlett’s compositional clarity and bold lines. In the series’ penultimate moments, three prints—I have special reservations, . . . Special houses, . . . And a special fear for my loved ones—effuse how Black women are remunerated for liberatory domestic, political, and intellectual work. Departing from the rest of the series’ heroic portraiture of known and anonymous figures, these three prints are pointed reminders of the treatment America has doled out to the Black women who have toiled for its advancement. Segregation and lynching are the reward. With a courage that will go on to become emblematic of her career, Catlett shows us the bloody hands of this country. In . . . Special houses I lost myself in the sweeping shadows curled under the eyes of two forlorn women flanked by a thicket of apartment buildings. One looked directly at me, exhaustion tattooed plainly on her face. The other tucks hers away in the down-turned corners of her mouth, her heavy eyelids and bowed chin. The woman’s sloping angles parallel the descent of the fire escape behind her, and her gaze follows its implied path to solid ground. Perhaps she is looking for a way out. Catlett severs the fantasy of America and leaves me with the reality, cold and twisted as the lifeless body of the noosed boy in . . . And a special fear for my loved ones. He lies beneath the feet of onlookers stepping brashly on the murder weapon in one last indulgent disrespect. He lifts up the open palm of his right hand, arm snapped back like a drowning man calling for help. I couldn’t look at the image for long without a churn in my gut, surfacing a centuries-old sorrow. Catlett’s inspiration for this series was the tragic 1944 assault case of Recy Taylor. The artist credits Taylor’s outspokenness about her assault with awakening her need to acknowledge the role of Black women in shaping, cultivating, educating, and caring for the United States.
In the second gallery, I encountered Catlett’s student sketches and drawings. Her early studies in paint, graphic design, and printmaking show the foundations of her signature style. Born in Washington, DC, in 1915, Catlett first trained at Howard University, learning from artists including Lois Mailou Jones and James A. Porter. These glimpses into Catlett’s undergraduate schoolwork and sketchbooks—alongside commentary from her friends, descendants, and collaborators—bridge the understanding of her as an artist with a knowledge of her as a whole person: a young girl, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother.
Elizabeth Catlett, Sharecropper (male), 1945. Williams College Museum of Art, Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The gallery’s presentation extends from Catlett’s early education through to her time creating a vast collection of prints with Taller de Grafíca Popular (The People’s Graphic Workshop, or TGP). Returning to Mexico just months after her initial fellowship, Catlett became a member of TGP in the fall of 1946. The group organized around the core principle of making art for el pueblo, the working-class Indigenous peoples fighting for liberation from colonialism, capitalism, and racism. TGP became a political home for Catlett, a community where she believed her life’s work began. Emerging within a post-Revolutionary Mexico, these artists were committed to political and cultural independence from Spain, taking an educational, realist approach to their printmaking practice. Supporting the TGP in collective action and creative collaboration, Catlett made prints during this time that locate parallels between the struggles of rural Indigenous laborers in Mexico and civil-rights, Black feminist, and labor movements in the United States. Campesinos Mexicanos (1958) adorns her subjects with the same wide-brimmed straw hat as Sharecropper (male) (1945) and Sharecropper (1946). The prints seem to whisper: I see you. Your work matters. I recognize your brilliance.
After soaking in the intimacies of Catlett’s studio practice in a narrow hallway display, I entered a sprawling third gallery that tells the story of how the Cold War merged with the McCarthy era in the United States amid Catlett’s growing political activism abroad. A series of linocut blocks Catlett carved in protest of US-backed coups in Guatemala and Chile meet in Central America Says No! (1986), striking both for its rhythmic composition and powerful anti-imperialist statement. Pedagogical concerns with African and Indigenous art history are displayed in abstractions Catlett fabricated during her time as la maestra, the first woman professor of sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Posters made in the early 1970s to support campaigns for the freedom of political prisoners like Angela Davis portray Catlett’s commitment to art as a functional tool.
Catlett’s affiliation with TGP and US-based Black communist groups including the Civil Rights Congress made her a perceived threat in the eyes of her home country. In 1962, following the birth of her third son with her second husband, fellow TGP artist Francisco Mora, Catlett applied for her Mexican citizenship. The US immediately barred her from returning. This exile lasted for nearly a decade. “To the degree and in the proportion that the United States constitute a threat to Black people, to that degree and more, do I hope I have earned that honor,” she pronounced during a speech to the 1970 Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art (CONFABA) after the US denied her visa to attend. She delivered her powerful remarks over the telephone to the crowd in Evanston, Illinois, contributing remotely to this pivotal moment in the Black Arts Movement. “For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist,” she added, “and all that it implies!”
Elizabeth Catlett, Angela Libre, 1972. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Neil Boyd Photography.
Reading about Catlett’s political exile caused a chill to settle in my spine like the air before a storm. It stuck with me as I walked through the two final galleries that reflect her later stylistic development, influenced by Pop Art and sensitive meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, and childhood. I couldn’t imagine the magnitude of her grief during this time. All around me was evidence of her outrage. Catlett’s exile juts out against the backdrop of the latest political tyranny of Donald Trump as president of the United States. His administration’s recent slew of unconstitutional mass deportations and detentions facilitated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate that a McCarthy era regression may be near. The Trump administration and its Republican supporters have encouraged ICE to deport legal residents and detain and deport US citizens while the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly overseen by Elon Musk, continues to attack cultural institutions in an effort to suffocate democracy.
The threat implied by Catlett in her 1970 CONFABA speech may again be holding its sharp edge to the same throat, drawing the attention of today’s authoritarian government. Seemingly speaking to the salient political concerns of our time, the retrospective provides—through the framework of Catlett’s Black revolutionary life—an example of how precarious the privilege of citizenship is, especially viewed against the United States’ chronic throes of fascism. Here is a woman not afraid to leave what does not serve her. A woman who knows what home is and what it ain’t. Catlett’s work is a warning, a blueprint, and a challenge for Black artists whose life work poses a threat to the status quo of an imperial, racist, and patriarchal nation.
