Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., on the fifteenth of April 1915. She took her undergraduate degree at Howard University (1935) — where she studied with James Porter, James Wells, and Lois Mailou Jones (also placed in this archive) — and her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1940 under Grant Wood, becoming the first African American to earn an MFA from Iowa.

She taught at Dillard University and at Hampton Institute in the early 1940s, joined the staff of the George Washington Carver School in Harlem in 1944, and in 1946 received a Rosenwald Fellowship to travel to Mexico to study with the Taller de Gráfica Popular — the Mexican social-realist printmakers' collective. She moved to Mexico City permanently in 1947, married the Mexican muralist Francisco Mora, and renounced her U.S. citizenship under State Department pressure in 1962 (she was reinstated as a U.S. citizen in 2002).

Her sustained body of work across seven decades comprised approximately one hundred and forty sculptures and several hundred prints. The Negro Woman print series (1946-47, fifteen linocuts on the lives and struggles of African American women) is among the foundational works of twentieth-century African American printmaking. Her sculptures — particularly Mother and Child (1959), Black Unity (1968), and the Louis Armstrong (1976) and Mahalia Jackson (1988) public monuments in New Orleans — combined African and pre-Columbian formal traditions with Mexican social-realist political content.

She taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1958 and chaired its sculpture department from 1959 to 1976 — the first woman to chair any department at UNAM. She continued working into her nineties.

She died at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the second of April 2012, age ninety-six.

She is honored here as the sculptor whose printmaking and public monuments fused the African American and Mexican social-realist traditions.