The following is excerpted from Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, published by the University of Chicago Press. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is on view at the Brooklyn Museum September 13, 2024–January 19, 2025.

 

In May 1970, denied a visa to enter the United States and speak at the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art (CONFABA), Elizabeth Catlett remained undeterred. She delivered her speech from Mexico, over the phone, in the eighth year of her exile from the US—the country of her birth. “I was refused,” she noted,

on the grounds that, as a foreigner, there was a possibility I would interfere in social or political problems, and thus, I constituted a threat to the well-being of the United States of America.

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. For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!

Recorded and played for the Black artists, art historians, and critics who had gathered at Northwestern University near Chicago for the conference—which became a landmark event in the Black Arts Movement (BAM)—these words are the conceptual North Star of the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies.

Elizabeth Catlett (born Washington, DC, 1915; died Cuernavaca, Mexico, 2012) is admired as an avowed feminist, lifelong activist, and deft formalist. Over the course of nearly a century—from Jim Crow segregation and McCarthy-era persecution, through Cold War exile, and into the first term of the Obama administration—she built a life dedicated to the pursuit of formal rigor and social justice, which she understood to be mutually reinforcing. These two passions run throughout her career, across seventy-five years of artistic production. When examining the archival record, alongside a close look at her work, what becomes clear is that her dedication to Black pride, revolutionary change, and artistic rigor were not inevitabilities, but born of a series of dogged, hard-nosed, and impassioned choices. We can take no part of it for granted.

For Catlett art was never just for art’s sake.

Encouraged, as she tells us, by artist Grant Wood to create work around “something you know the most about,” she depicted Black women. However, her commitment to depicting Black people as fine art was about more than self-representation—it was a profoundly political act. Light-skinned with mixed-race ancestry, Catlett could have passed for white. She flirted with that color line only once, sneaking into the white section of a movie theater in the South, before disavowing the practice altogether. Instead of giving into society’s pervasive anti-Blackness, she actively combated it. She had a clear-eyed view of colorism. Though she would be relegated to a lifetime of oppression, she proudly identified as a Black woman and made that subjectivity the leitmotif of her career.

Catlett navigated her artistry and politics with a Black feminist framework as her compass. Known as Betty Mora to friends and family, Catlett used her maiden name professionally—a common practice among Black Leftist women in the 1940s who asserted their independence while they addressed sexism within a larger class critique. Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term, Catlett committed herself to examining Black women’s intersectional identity. As she stated in her 1945 Rosenwald grant proposal:

Negro women in America have long suffered under the double handicap of race and sex. Because of subtle American propaganda in the movies, radio and stage, they have come to be generally regarded as good cooks, housemaids and nurses and little else. 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.

For Catlett, Black Power was only effective if it galvanized a broader commitment to transnational solidarity. Long before “revolution” became a keyword of the BAM of the 1960s and ‘70s, Catlett had embraced a political radicalism that merged the goals of the Black Left in the United States with those of the Mexican Revolution. In New York in the 1940s, she may well have conceived or even executed her political cartoons for Congress Vue, the journal of the National Negro Congress, in its offices, where walls were papered with prints from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), a workshop based in Mexico City. Once in Mexico—Catlett arrived there in 1946—she saw and depicted “her two peoples” (Black Americans and Mexicans) as similarly bound by intersecting forms of oppression.

Catlett had a robust art education. She began her training at Howard University, where James A. Porter was a revered authority on African American art history. Later at the University of Iowa she took classes not only with Grant Wood but also with H. W. Janson, the author of the survey that solidified the canon of the Western tradition for decades. Catlett was ecumenical in her artistic references—Constantin Brâncuşi, Käthe Kollwitz and the German expressionists, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, traditional African and Mesoamerican sculpture, Mexican muralists, Cuban graphic design, and even Andy Warhol informed her work. Over the years, Catlett repeatedly professed her love of abstract art. If we take her at her word, we can not only appreciate how clearly she understood the potential of her materials but also begin to see that underexamined aspects of her work are more central to her style.

Catlett navigated her artistry and politics with a Black feminist framework as her compass.

For Catlett art was never just for art’s sake. While she was most certainly committed to a rigorous exploration of form, she felt a moral obligation to work in a style that would be legible to all. “Let’s…create the best art possible for the liberation of our beautiful Black People,” she wrote in her 1970 CONFABA address.

Black Art is one media by which the masses of our people can be made aware, educated, and projected up to the summit of Black Liberation… we should learn all the techniques we can, make ourselves as professional as possible, so that we are prepared to be the best of functioning artists. Our people deserve no less. Let’s dump that inferior stuff and raise our artistic standards, because racism is the white man’s game.

Beauty, we see, is a lifeline in the struggle for justice. And expressed through art, Catlett’s political views extended beyond it into direct action.

Catlett invariably argued for a public art—one that privileged community as its audience—and blazed a trail with a Black feminist framework as her torch. Many aspects of her life and work resonate with contemporary concerns, from recent conversations about anti-racist activism, intersectional feminism, and Black visibility, to the migrant crisis, essential workers who saw us through a global pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. How she would have relished the discussion. She was and is a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!

 

Dalila Scruggs is Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.