Afro-American-Mexican sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) was one of the 10 underrated artists gaining greater recognition in 2023, according to the magazine’s recent issue Art News. Currently, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany, exhibits 175 pieces of what it calls the first comprehensive review of his work, much of which was made in Mexico. Catlett acquired Mexican nationality in 1962.
According to the German museum, if the images do not exist, one has to create them. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were certain absences in the way African-American history was represented in the canon of art history. Some collective experiences lacked images with which people could identify, something necessary for the development of the idea of community and shared iconography.
In the words of art historian Melanie Anne Herzog, Catlett was a people’s artist. Her politically charged and compelling aesthetic prints and sculptures, produced over more than 70 years in the United States and then Mexico, are visual statements of the dignity, strength, vulnerability and resilience of black women, Mexican workers and those who suffer due to oppression in America. Her art was driven by radical empathy, that is, a deep sense of connection and identification with those she felt motivated to serve in her art.
Born and raised in Washington, the young Elizabeth developed an understanding of the oppression of African Americans and a fierce sense of justice. She grew up listening to the memories of slavery recounted by her maternal grandmother, narratives that shaped her early awareness of the suffering and exploitation of people of African descent in the United States, which paved the way for her lifelong purpose: to give a voice to her fellow human beings in the art.
Catlett graduated from Howard University in Washington, home of the first historically black art department. Pursuing his studies at the University of Iowa, he shifted his focus from painting to sculpture. She was the first person to graduate (1940) with a master’s degree in sculpture.
Later, upon moving to New York, she worked in the studio of the sculptor Ossip Zadkine (he was also a mentor to Manuel Felguérez), a refugee in the United States, who introduced her to modernist abstraction, which, she said, allowed her to better understand the nuanced abstraction of African art as a way of expressing oneself through form.
Catlett traveled to Mexico in 1946 with the intention of studying sculpture and working as a guest artist at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). A few months later she returned to the United States to divorce the painter Charles White and return to Mexico the following year to establish her permanent residence. This decision was, in part, a response to the US government’s increasingly atrocious attacks on left-wing artists, intellectuals and activists at the end of World War II, Herzog writes.
The TGP became Catlett’s social and artistic home. By then she had married the painter and engraver Francisco Mora, with whom she had three children. While they were little, her mother focused on the graph. However, when she returned to sculpture in the mid-1950s, she resumed her work in clay at the La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, where she had studied with Francisco Zúñiga. In 1958, Catlett was hired as the first professor of sculpture at the now Faculty of Arts and Design (FAD) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She always believed that her students needed more than anything technical skills that would allow them to communicate her ideas effectively. In 1975 she retired from the FAD.
According to Herzog, Catlett’s transnational perspective is epitomized in the allusion to ambiguous and multiple ethnicities in many of her sculptures of women and is manifested in the overlapping and convergence of her visual references from the lineages of African and Mexican art.
Among his best-known sculptures are black unit (1968), practical object (1970), Tribute to black women poets (1984) y Tribute to my young black sisters (1984).
During his first two years in the country, he completed his series Black Woman, internationally renowned (1946-1947). In 2011 he joined the Academy of Arts in Mexico as an honorary academic.
The exhibition Elizabeth Catlett will remain until June 16 at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany.
2024-01-10 15:52:19
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