Elizabeth Catlett - The History of Disability in Art - Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The History of Disability in Art

Elizabeth Catlett

American-Mexican (Washington, D.C., 1915 – Cuernavaca, Mexico, 2012)

Elizabeth Catlett is a sculptor and printmaker. Her etchings depict impassioned portraits of Black and Mexican people and examined the women’s experiences. Catlett attended Howard University, where she studied under artist Loïs Mailou Jones and philosopher Alain Locke. At Howard, Catlett was also greatly influenced by the artists James A. Porter and James Herring. She graduated in 1937 from Howard and then earned her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where she studied under Grant Wood. Wood advised her to make images of what she knew best, so Catlett began sculpting images of Black women and children. Catlett’s work deals with the political aesthetics of race and identity. Her work details personal and intimate imagery that seeks to highlight lived experience as a means of truth telling. Her portraiture is sculptural, using the medium of printmaking to allow her to express her own hand and carving of the woodblock. In the 1940s, Catlett moved to Mexico, where she made political prints with a print collective in Mexico called the Taller de Gráfica Popular (“People’s Graphic Workshop”). Catlett worked with the organization from 1946 to 1966. However, because of their collective association to the Communist Party at the time and her own activism within Mexico City, Catlett was barred from entering the United States. In 1962, she disowned her American citizenship and became a Mexican citizen. She then moved to Cuernavaca, Morelos, where she taught at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Later in life she spent time back in the United States, but her home and her studio were in Mexico.

There is a Woman in Every Color, 1975

Elizabeth Catlett (American-Mexican, 1915–2012)

color linoleum cut, screenprint, and woodcut

22 1/4 x 29 15/16 in. (56.52 x 76.04 cm)

Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, 2015.61. © 2021 Catlett Mora Family Trust / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

African American artist Elizabeth Catlett contributed to the Civil Rights Movement with politically engaged sculptures and prints. This print experiments with several techniques to capture different representations of Black women. The woman’s dignified face is rendered as both positive and negative, perhaps suggesting a call for racial equality. Catlett’s inclusion of the multicolored women on the right references the color bar that registers color accuracy in printing. Here, it enacts an integration of the margins (or marginalized) that can be read as a metaphor for the artist’s commitments to global civil rights and equality. The colorful women suggest an accessible and intersectional movement of feminism that would call for the liberation of all women, a prescient forecast that would come into being only during the third wave of feminism in the 1990s.