Monday, April 9, 2012

Catlett Blazed Trails As An African-American Artist: - died in her sleep , at age 96.

Artist Elizabeth Catlett began creating powerful images of strong African-Americans before World War II, when the art world had little interest in such portrayals. Yet she held to her convictions, and today her etchings and sculptures are in major museums around the world.

New York, NY –

Sharecroppers, laborers, mothers and their children -- these people have captured the imagination of sculptor Elizabeth Catlett for over 40 years. Catlett talked about her life and work at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this week and WNYC's Siddhartha Mitter was there.

Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists, at the Bronx Museum

Elizabeth Catlett was the granddaughter of slaves, and that legacy had a lasting impact on her life and her work. Her art was highly political. She moved to Mexico in the 1940s. From there she supported the civil rights struggle back in the U.S. and also addressed political scandals in Latin America.

Her art and activism caught the attention of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s. She was denied admission back into the U.S. for nearly a decade after the government labeled her an undesirable alien. Despite the government's scrutiny, Catlett never became a well-known public figure.

Howard was not her first choice. She had won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, but the college refused to allow her to matriculate when it learned she was black.

Harriet
Elizabeth Catlett's intimate portrayal of an elderly black female sharecropper

Her best-known works depict black women as strong, maternal figures. In one early sculpture, “Mother and Child’’ (1939), a young woman with close-cropped hair and features resembling a Gabon mask cradles a child against her shoulder. It won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. In a recent piece, “Bather’’ (2009), a similar-looking subject flexes her triceps in a gesture of vitality and confidence.

Her art did not exclude men; “Invisible Man,’’ her 15-foot-high bronze memorial to the author Ralph Ellison, can be seen in Riverside Park in New York.
http://elizabethcatlett.net/catalog.html

Her art was often presented in the United States, in major surveys in the 1960s and ’70s in particular, among them “Two Centuries of Black American Art,’’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. Her posters of Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and other figures were widely distributed.
Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, the youngest of three children. Her mother was a truant officer; her father, who died before she was born, had taught at Tuskegee University and in public schools.