by José de la Isla
Hispanic Link News Service
CIUDAD DE MÉXICO – Elizabeth Catlett died this month at age 96 in Cuernavaca, 80 miles distant from this city.
Most accounts of her passing simply referred to her as an African American and a bi-national, a Mexican citizen born and raised in the United States. A few typecast her as an “important African-American” artist to typify her work.
She was much more than that.
She was in the tradition of the 20th century masters. The National Council of Culture and the Arts of Mexico has described Catlett as an artist who always demonstrated in her art a profound interest “in social justice and the rights of black people and Mexican women.”
An obituary in the Los Angeles Times mentioned that the U.S. government had labeled her an “undesirable alien” in 1959. It mentioned that she was briefly held in a roundup of ex-patriots living in Mexico who were suspected of Communist activity. She was denied a U.S. visa throughout the 1960s.
The same obituary quoted her as once telling a St. Petersburg Times interviewer that in Mexico “as an artist you’re greatly admired rather than looked at as something strange. There’s a different attitude toward art in Mexico.”
Catlett’s better-known works include lithographs of the late ’60s of Malcolm X’s and Angela Davis’s images. Her best-known prints include Sharecropper (1968) and Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969), expressing her lifelong commitment to art as a tool for social change, often incorporating the slogan, “Black Is Beautiful.”
Her well-known sculptures include Dancing Figure (1961), The Black Woman Speaks and Target (1970). Black Unity (1968) shows a mahogany fist on one side and African visages on the other. The sculptures Homage to Black Women Poets and Homage to My Black Young Sisters (both 1968) are red-cedar abstracts of a woman with raised head and fist.
Catlett had said she wanted to show the history and strength of women — urban, country, working and great women of history.
Her biography alone reveals how, in a sense, that one’s life and work fuse the same way nationality, ethnicity, identity, life mission and talents do.
Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. in 1915, the granddaughter of freed slaves, a math-professor father and truant-officer mother. In the 1930s she earned her undergraduate degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.
She was exposed to the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias, both of whom had worked extensively in the United States.
Covarrubias, in fact, as an illustrator for the New Yorker and other national magazines in the 1920s and ’30s had introduced to millions the image of sophisticated jazz-age Negroes and Harlem.
Catlett preferred doing semi-abstract sculptures after studying the form as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, earning a master’s in fine art in 1940. She sculpted Negro Mother and Child for her graduate thesis and won first prize in a 1940 Chicago exhibit of African-American artists, the Columbia Exposition.
That same year she chaired the art department of New Orleans’ Dillard University. Later in the 1940s she moved to Mexico City to study ceramics. She added struggles of Mexican workers to her commitment to African-American causes. She referred to “my two people,” even blending their physical features in her art.
She found like spirits in the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective known for mass-producing posters supporting populist causes. She met renowned artist Francisco Mora here and married him. He died in 2002.
In Mexico Catlett gained an acceptance she had not known at home, the same as other U.S. artists, writers, musicians such as composer Aaron Copland have experienced. She continued championing black causes even after becoming a Mexican citizen in 1962.
Perhaps this has to do with artists having a responsibility like that of writers to show the quest for justice, catching individual temperament and mood, finding feeling and exposing their color and shape.
[José de la Isla, a nationally syndicated columnist for Hispanic Link and Scripps Howard news services, has been recognized for two consecutive years for his commentaries by New America Media. His forthcoming book is “Our Man on the Ground.” Previous books include “DAY NIGHT LIFE DEATH HOPE” (2009) and “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (2003). Reach him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.] See this column in Spanish and more at www.HispanicLink.org.
