Elizabeth Catlett, formal rigor in the great depression

Washington,

There are more than one and more than two stereotypes that cracked throughout his career, until his death thirteen years ago, the Afro -American artist Elizabeth Catlett, who was born in Washington in 1915 but decided to adopt Mexican nationality and died in Cuernavaca. In his art he maintained an early activist will in relation to the inequality of classes and genres, especially from the great depression (the commitment is not an option, much less, typical of the last decades), and knew how to combine those positions with the formalistic rigor and the management of a careful aesthetic.

Both aspects of their work are inseparable, as the anthology dedicated by the National Gallery of Art of the US capital, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago: brings together one hundred fifty pieces, between sculptures and engravings, paintings, drawings and ephemeral objects, many of them dated precisely in the decades of the thirties and the forty, for her a stage of creative maturity in which the economic crisis made her aware of the consequences of poverty and racism, especially in social groups in themselves favored.

Injustice would, since then, almost indissoluble from his work, together with the claim of women, since he was his very early and openly expressed feminism: his engravings and sculptures are inspired by organic abstraction, American and Mexican modernism and African art, but first of all they sought to reflect the difficulties and vital triumphs of African -American and Mexican women.

The technical meticulousness and the claim of social justice would be the two legs of their production, and never wanted to separate them in their long journey, which took Washington to Cuernavaca passing through Chicago, New Orleans and New York. In Mexico, in any case, he resided and taught for more than sixty years, hugging close political positions both to the American black left and the lessons of the Mexican Revolution.

Elizabeth Catlett, Randy Hemminghaus, Anne Q. McKeown, Print Club of New York. Gossip, 2005

Organized at the same time according to thematic and chronological criteria, this retrospect begins by remembering the protests that Catlett organized while studying high school against lynching in the streets of Washington, to then review its academic activities in the universities of Howard and Iowa and its continuous concern for those questions of race, gender and class. After becoming the first person to obtain a master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, he continued his training studying ceramics at the Chicago Institute of Art and perfecting his practice in lithography at the South Side Community Art Center; Then, already in New York, he would deepen for four years in the principles of European modernist sculpture and joined a community of artists and intellectuals with whom he shared political positions. In Washington you can see paintings and sketches of their youth that come to endorse that, despite the most widespread idea of it, it was not only sculptor and recorder, but a versatile author.

Both his interest in art and his attention to politics would consolidate from 1946, when he traveled to Mexico City to learn recorded next to the Popular Graphic Workshop group (he would meet Siqueiros, Rivera and Kahlo). It did not take to nationalize and get involved actively in left -wing cultural circles both in the capital and in Cuernavaca, but while he raised his family and taught, Catlett never lost sight of the struggle for the rights of the black community in the United States. Declared to the magazine EBONYin 1970: Black and Mexican people inspire me, my two villages.

Elizabeth Catlett. Red Cross Woman (Nurse), around 1944

From the sixties they populated their engraved bold strokes, and their sculptures won voluptuous forms; In both and sought to establish parallels between female experience both in the United States and Mexico. In Tribute to my young black sisters (1968) and in his public monument Floating family (1996), Catlett examines intersectional feminism and family ties through sculpture, incorporating references to Brancusi, Henry Moore, African historical sculpture and Mesoamerican; In this exhibition we will also see a selection of its best -known engravings, from the series Sharecropper and Black woman of the forties and fifty, to creations such as Watts/Detroit/Washington/Harlem/Newarkinspired by radical political activism of the immediately subsequent decades.

He wants to influence this project, as it is not difficult to guess and stressed his curator, Catherine Morris, in That Elizabeth Catlett’s art and activism resonate strongly in today’s world, reminding us of national and international struggles ongoing on inequality and injustice. The exhibition not only celebrates its artistic contributions, but also brings a historical voice to the present, showing how generations of black feminists continue to inspire us to fight for a more equitable and fair society.

The exhibition title, “Black Revolutionary Artist”, has been taken for this of its identity statements during a talk in 1970: I have been, I am and always hope to be a black revolutionary artist, with all that it implies.