Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) was more than an artist, she was a visionary whose life and work boldly redefined what it meant to create for liberation.
Over the course of her six-decade career, Catlett fused the personal with the political, using sculpture and printmaking to amplify the voices of the marginalized, especially Black women.
Born in Washington, D.C., in an era when both race and gender limited opportunities, Catlett’s resolve to become an artist defied every societal expectation.
She enrolled at Howard University in 1931, studying under the likes of Loïs Mailou Jones and James Herring, and later made history as the first person to receive an MFA from the University of Iowa. There, she was mentored by Regionalist painter Grant Wood, who gave her a piece of advice that would shape her life’s work:
“Make art about what you know best.”
Catlett took that message to heart — and to the world. From early wood and clay sculptures to powerful linocut prints, her work centered on the lives of Black women, workers, and families, including poignant portraits of mothers and civil rights icons.
In 1946, she traveled to Mexico on a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, where she joined El Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Graphic Workshop), a hub of socially conscious printmaking. There, she produced her legendary series The Black Woman, honoring figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Phillis Wheatley while chronicling the triumphs and struggles of everyday Black women.
Though she planned to stay in Mexico briefly, Catlett would go on to live there permanently, marrying artist Francisco Mora and raising three sons.
She continued to create groundbreaking art that reimagined iconic forms like the Madonna and Child through the lens of Black motherhood. Works such as Mother and Child became quietly radical in their embrace of tenderness, identity, and maternal power.
Even from afar, Catlett never turned away from the fight for justice in the U.S. Her striking print Malcolm X Speaks for Us and other politically charged works declared her solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement.
Her activism eventually led the U.S. government to label her an “undesirable alien,” barring her from her homeland for over a decade — a restriction not lifted until 2002. Yet, Catlett never backed down. In 1970, when she was unable to travel to a conference in her honor, she phoned in her remarks:
“I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!”
Catlett’s legacy lives on — in museums, in movements, and in the countless artists she inspired, particularly those of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. She proved that art could be a weapon, a balm, and a call to action all at once.
Elizabeth Catlett didn’t just depict history. She carved herself into it!
