1. 1.Elizabeth Catlett
The potent writing of Elizabeth Catlett is well known. For ourselves and others to understand
and appreciate, Catlett at first when stated that
the objective of her work was to "present black
people in their beauty and self respect." In in
addition to providing a brave painting of an
unknown woman, Sharecropper draws attention
to the challenges of land ownership, a structure
in which landowners expect to be paid the
land's rent with a chunk of the crop, leading to
an unbroken cycle of poverty.
HISTORY
Elizabeth Catlett 1915–2012
Name Elizabeth Catlett
Birth Washington, D.C,1915
Death Cuernavaca, Mexico 2012
The granddaughter of former slaves, Catlett was raised in Washington, D.C. Her father
died before she was born and her mother held several jobs to raise three children.
Refused admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, Catlett
enrolled at Howard University, where her teachers included artist Loïs Mailou
Jones and philosopher Alain Locke. She graduated with honors in 1935 and went on to
earn the first MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa five years later.
Grant Wood, her painting teacher at Iowa, encouraged students to make art about what
they knew best and to experiment with different
mediums, inspiring Catlett to create lithographs, linoleum
cuts, and sculpture in wood, stone, clay, and bronze. She
drew subjects from African American and later Mexican
life.
In 1946, a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation enabled
Catlett to move to Mexico City with her husband,
printmaker Charles White. There she joined the Taller de
Gráfica Popular, an influential and political group of
printmakers. At the Taller, Catlett met the Mexican artist
2. Francisco Mora, whom she married after divorcing White and with whom she had
three sons.
Catlett taught at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1958 until her
retirement in 1976, producing realistic and highly stylized two- and three-dimensional
figures. Her subjects ranged from tender maternal images to confrontational symbols
of the Black Power movement, to portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and the writer
Phyllis Wheatley.
During the past 40 years, museums and galleries have held more than 50 solo
exhibitions of Catlett’s sculptures and prints, including important retrospectives in
1993 and 1998. Catlett continued to make art through her mid-90s, while dividing her
time between New York and Cuernavaca.
Works by Elizabeth Catlett
Their Songs Being Sung
The Black female experience is a major theme in
Elizabeth Catlett's artwork. She places a lot of
emphasis on creating compositions with multiple
figures in both her prints and many of her sculptures.
One of the six lithographs Catlett created to
accompany her friend and author Margaret Walker's
1937 poem "For My People" is titled Singing Their
Songs. Black is mentioned in Walker's poem's
opening line.
2. Barbara Jones-Hogu
One of the founding original members of
AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant
Artists), which was founded in Chicago in the
1960s, was Barbara Jones-Hogu. The collective of
artists was formed to exchange viewpoints as well
as push for change through their artwork.
Although she initially studied painting, a few of
her best-known well-known screen-prints
highlight bright colors and text.
3. HISTORY
Name
Birth
Death
3. Favianna Rodriguez
Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary
artist based in Oakland, California. Her
artwork depicts race-based equity, global
warming, gender justice, and migration. Bold
colors and distinctive mark-making in her job
role can be used to define this and attract the
viewer along. She would then generate items
that students will be drawn to. Many of her
early works, including monotypes and
reprieve printing, explore different letterpress
printing techniques.
HISTORY
Name
Birth
Death
