This post was originally published on artnews.com
Elizabeth Catlett’s retrospective “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” at the Brooklyn Museum, testifies to how Catlett’s creative ethos saw visual art and social justice as deeply intertwined. In addition to displaying her oeuvre, the museum has rounded up her various cultural and stylistic influences from Black Power Movement ephemera to pre-Hispanic sculptural references, pinpointing how Catlett’s intersectional politics were syncretic with her formal techniques. What results is a Catlett exhibition that’s long overdue and right on time.
Born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., Catlett, two generations shy of experiencing enslavement, nestled stories of her grandmother’s cruel reality into her psyche. These narratives were later reconfigured in Catlett’s artworks as positive and more complex depictions of Black women throughout history. In the first gallery, home to a mixture of her prints, ephemera, sculptures, and paintings, Catlett’s “Black Woman Series” (1946–47) features active or earnest scenes of Black women in positions of stride, seclusion, or service. The linocut I am the Negro Woman (1947) captures the emotional tenor of an individual. Her face, cropped to fit a restrictive four-by-four-inch frame, emerges from the shadows with a compelling gaze. The woman’s coffee skin features white and black striations: while the white lines communicate where light touches her, the latter lines hollow out her under-eyes and cheeks to register a fatigue that evinces perseverance.
The striation marks are thin in this print; Catlett deploys thicker lines in works like In Harriet Tubman, I Helped Hundreds to Freedom (1946)—a scene of Tubman leading enslaved people through the Underground Railroad. Tubman’s body is scaled twice as large as the rows of people to her left; her dress holds long stiff creases that outline her elongated legs in contrapposto, while her equally exaggerated arms point toward freedom. With Sharecropper (1952), Catlett’s solemn oil painting of a Black woman with a towering torso, the artist revives Cubist elements derived from African masks to emanate spiritual characteristics woven into the woman’s body. Angular folds surround her lengthy, terra-cotta arms, while a regal neck and smooth geometric shapes contour her face. Catlett’s images of Black women, imbued with reverence and command, fulfilled her desire to reconfigure their identity throughout Modernist culture and to fashion an aesthetic that prioritizes their interior world, social condition, and African lineage.
Motherhood is a key motif in Catlett’s oeuvre. Responding to a glossary of Christian European maternal iconography, Catlett replicated the Mother and Child archetype, initially premiered as a limestone carving for her master’s thesis in 1940, later as lithographs and sculptures in terra-cotta, wood, and black marble. Her reincarnations of Madonna and Child portray Black mothers’ experiences of bodily autonomy and safety, which are often denied under a white supremacist regime. And as the motif evolves over time through material and form, it becomes more curvaceous without ever fully departing from its geometric original.
On view in the museum’s feminist wing, the exhibition surrounds Judy Chicago’s infamous Dinner Party (1974–79), which is on permanent display. The installation barely considered Black women—including only one, Sojourner Truth, representing her, unlike the others, with a face instead of a vulva. It might be tempting to think of Catlett’s work as a rebuttal to Chicago’s breed of white feminism, but in fact, her work predates it. The juxtaposition links to contemporary Black women’s retorts to a mainstream feminism, forming a lineage with Hortense Spillers’s book Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) and Lorraine O’Grady’s essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992). Spillers recounts how the plantation system reorients a family structure so that Black women sit at the helm, while O’Grady reflects on a legacy of conflicting images of Black women in dominant visual culture: as an overt fetish symbol or as an invisible, mundane laborer. With this nuance, Catlett’s work both precedes and complements the work of these feminist theorists, rectifying a history of negative imagery against Black women.
Catlett’s lived experience in cities like New York, Chicago, and Mexico City profoundly shaped her political consciousness and artistic sensibilities. Studying under the Russian-French sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York inspired her to embrace internationalism and abstraction. In the US, Catlett was heavily involved in Black leftist and communist groups, her commitments later enhanced by her trip to Mexico in 1946. There, she became a member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artist collective that believed art should serve the political concerns of Mexican people, and that drew on their indigenous roots. Here, Catlett found solidarity, an echo of her interest in imbuing an indigenous African identity in her artworks. In 1947, she studied with Francisco Zúñiga and José L. Ruiz. Zúñiga introduced her to pre-Columbian ceramic techniques and woodcarving.
As her work began to center a global solidarity among oppressed people through the lens of communism, she became susceptible to the red scare of the McCarthy era. As a result, she was exiled from the United States in 1952, and soon became a Mexican citizen. This background makes works like Political Prisoner (1971), inspired by Angela Davis’s detainment, all the more potent. The 6-foot cedar sculpture shows a female figure with her head facing the sky and her wrists cuffed behind her. Her flayed torso reveals the colors of the Pan-African flag.
What makes these ruminations between art and politics, representation and interiority, nationalism and humanism succeed is Catlett’s ability to shapeshift across mediums as she shuttles between ideas. A common thread throughout the exhibition is the way she married these apexes to form a multilingual visual vocabulary. Shifting between printmaking, painting, and sculpture, Catlett condensed the visual spectrum of two and three-dimensional surfaces, sampling African and Mesoamerican aesthetics, such as stylized forms and simple geometric shapes, to surpass the thresholds of modernism. Catlett embodied self-determination and universality, which led her to craft artworks that function ahead of and outside time.