How Elizabeth Catlett blazed the trail for Black revolutionary art

Today we are blessed with a generation of artists who are outspoken and uncompromising about voicing their politics through art and beyond the art world, but they walk a path paved by many others before them. Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is one such trailblazer, known for her staunch feminism and social justice activism, which she practiced as an artist and an educator throughout her more than sixty-year career.

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, now on view at the Brooklyn Museum (running until January 2025), offers a comprehensive retrospective on the activist artist. The most extensive exhibition of Catlett’s work to date, it takes us on a deep dive into her life and art, from the iconic Black Unity (1968) and Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969) to lesser-known works from throughout her oeuvre.

The idea for the exhibition was born in 2018 when Catherine Morris, Curator of Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, had a chance encounter with Dalila Scruggs, now the Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Scruggs and Morris organised the exhibition alongside Mary Lee Corlett, the former Associate Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, where the show will travel in March 2025.

A voice of solidarity

‘Catlett was a no-brainer in terms of alignment of ideals,’ explains Scruggs. ‘It was 2020 when we really got into the depths of it, and we began to understand the ways that the solidarity and politics that Catlett brings were resonant with a moment where Black people were being disproportionately affected by Covid, and then the murder of George Floyd. All these things created a moment where we could more clearly see the relevance of Elizabeth Catlett.’ The resulting landmark show includes over 200 works that take us through Catlett’s long, varied and committed career.

Born in Washington DC in 1915 Catlett lived in Washington, Chicago and New York before she moved to Mexico in 1946 where she stayed for the remainder of her life. Catlett attended Howard University, where she was taught by the writer and philosopher Alain Locke. She in turn inspired and taught many at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

Her practice and political activism were constants throughout her life, which meant that when the Black Arts Movement arose during the 1960s, she already had a legacy. Like artists that came before her such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, she was a great inspiration to younger artists such as Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni.

Catlett’s series The Black Woman, which documented the lives and roles of Black women in the Unites State in the 1940s, was groundbreaking for its time. One of the key radical things about the series was the titles of the works, which gave voice to the interior lives and perspectives of the subjects while also speaking to their collective identity.

Her work — which includes many lino prints, drawings and carved sculptures of the female experience in her native United States and in her adopted home of Mexico — is interwoven with an active political life, a pursuit of led to her being exiled from the United States in 1962 and unable to return to the country for nine years.

Catlett’s long and storied life in art offered many possible ways to show her body of work. Both Morris and Scruggs saw this exhibition as an opportunity to desegregate Catlett’s oeuvre, which has historically been divided up, separating her work with the revolutionary print collective Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico from her work that focused on African American women in the US.

Unifying a diverse body of work

‘As curators of feminist art, we often find ourselves, when dealing with monographic subjects, particularly women, particularly Black women, particularly othered people, there's this inclination to start with biography,’ Morris says. ‘We had great conversations about what that means in Catlett’s case. How do you both tell a biographical story, a narrative story that is very important for people to know?’

Known for her instantly recognisable figurative prints and sculpture, Catlett also loved abstraction, and a section of the exhibition explores her interest in modernism, but according to Scruggs, she felt the best way to connect with her audience and her subject was to focus on figurative work. ‘This speaks to the ways that Catlett’s politics and aesthetics are so inextricably linked. So, while she's in New York and thinking through her political investments in the working-class people of Harlem, she’s also thinking about what the best way is to communicate with them. For me, I see that tension in her work, echoing throughout her practice, through a very early investment in these two forms.’

Black Unity (1968), a large carved wooden fist — a symbol of Black power, resistance and the Civil Rights Movement — uses both medium and material to communicate its essential and direct message of solidarity.

In putting together the largest survey of Catlett’s work to date, Morris and Scruggs began to see lines of aesthetics emerge in her work. Their intention of unifying her practice led to other discoveries including the fact she also made little-known satirical, political illustrations that became a key part of the exhibition. ‘Something I wanted to achieve with the show is to disrupt people’s idea that she's just a sculptor and a printmaker. Her practice is so diverse, and those cartoons or illustrations are such a wonderful example,’ Scruggs explains.

The exhibition stands as a starting point to understand the art and legacy of a cultural icon we perhaps don’t know as well as we think we do. Catlett dedicated her practice to representing and elevating the Black and brown female experience and communicating that message in a such a clear and generous way that it would not only represent but reach her subjects. In her life and her work she remained an activist and stood by her ideals, engaging people with her art and ideas, leaving the profound legacy that we see in this exhibition.

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, with support provided by Christie’s, through 19 January 2025.