'Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist' Review: An Exhibition With Gravity and Grace
A Brooklyn Museum show features sculptures, paintings and works on paper in its exploration of the artist's work, which met racism and hardship with a bold, humane vision.

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is hardly an unknown artist. Her sharecropper images, particularly a 1952 linocut of a weary worker in a wide-brimmed hat, are recognizable far beyond the art world. Her seductive, abstracted, but still figurative sculptures can be found in the permanent collections of many museums, and her works are shown in special group exhibitions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," which attracted nearly a half-million visitors.

Sharecropper (1952)

Yet never before in the U.S. has she been given an exhibition as comprehensive as "Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies," at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 19, 2025. (It will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago next year.)

With more than 200 sculptures, works on paper, paintings and ephemera, this stunning exhibition showcases the breadth and depth of her imagery and materials during a 75-year career, which stretched from the Depression and Jim Crow to the Obama Administration. Equally important, it illustrates her abiding concern for the misery endured by black people (especially women) and Mexican peasants. And the exhibition, organized in New York by Dalila Scruggs, curator of African American art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Catherine Morris, the Brooklyn Museum's senior curator for feminist art, exposes Catlett's deep devotion to equality. While she studied art at Howard University and earned an MFA at the University of Iowa (learning from regionalist Grant Wood and renowned art historian H.W. Janson), and while she was inspired by artists from Picasso to Henry Moore, she deliberately chose to create widely accessible art and to favor affordable prints over other mediums.

"My right is a future..."

In the first gallery, visitors are introduced to Catlett via "The Black Woman" series (1946-47), a narrative in 15 linocuts hung on one wall, with images evolving from a fearful face to an uplifted, righteous one, and scenes of (mostly) hardship in between. When the heart-rending titles are strung together—"I Am the Negro Woman," "I Have Always Worked Hard in America," "In the fields," "In Other Folks' Homes" and on to "My right is a future of equality with other Americans"—they read as poetry. The same gallery displays a standout terracotta sculpture, "Tired" (1946), of an exhausted woman, feet firmly planted on the ground, her elongated neck tilted up, perhaps in search of relief. It's a deeply humane piece.

Unfolding both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition briefly visits Catlett's early work. An untitled pastel of a serious young woman (c. 1935) illustrates her talent at capturing character. She experiments, successfully, with a mild form of Cubism, in works like "Mother and Child" (1944), a lithograph that brilliantly conveys both tenderness and brutality. In it, a mother encasing her little one in her arms almost completely fills the frame—Catlett's frequent use of close cropping adds intimacy to her works—leaving room only for a barren tree symbolic of lynchings.

In 1946, Catlett moved to Mexico, where she joined Taller de Gráfica Popular, a leftist artists' collective dedicated to publishing prints about social justice. There, she limned many graphically bold designs, many empathetic to the plight of Mexican campesinos. She calls a lithograph of a raggedly dressed boy, folded into a small corner, his arms tight across his chest, "Niño Papelero" (1947)—which translates as "Paper Boy." She portrays another boy shining shoes, a woman cooking on a tiny stove whose flames flare dangerously close to her head, and in "Alfabetización (Literacy)," from 1953, three women learning from one book.

"Mother and Child" (1965-75)

Across the years, Catlett created images of heroic figures, from Harriet Tubman to Sojourner Truth to Nat Turner. She enshrined Malcolm X and Angela Davis in her works, portrayed integrated schooling in Cuba, and referred to race riots in American cities. "Black Unity," a striking cedar sculpture, depicts on one side a raised fist—made in 1968, the year black athletes protested at the Mexico City Olympics—and on the other, two faces. She looked back at African art and at the "Mexicanness" of indigenous culture (an idea fostered by Mexican revolutionaries). The result was work like "Indian Woman" (1973), a black marble sculpture that borrows from both. She also created public art, fashioning monuments to people like Mahalia Jackson, seen here in a small bronze model (2010) of the singer, arms outstretched, made for a New Orleans park.

The exhibition climaxes in its penultimate gallery, where an array of her powerful sculptures sits in niches and on a raised platform—each one an example of her sure sense of line and beauty. "Homage to My Young Black Sisters" (1968) most clearly defines Catlett's Black Power spirit—a dynamic, abstracted woman, carved from red cedar, raises her arm, her fist clenched, her head uplifted in defiance. Nearby, a less confrontational "Stargazer" (1997), elegant in black marble, features a full-length woman reclining on one elbow. And "Torso" (2008) is a pure, alluring marble abstraction.

Catlett almost always had social activism on her mind. But her art frequently rose above that. Rather than didactic, it feels poignant.