In Sharecropper Catlett combined her dedication to championing the oppressed with her abiding concern for women. This print focuses on the head of a female farm worker, whose face, made rough and leathery by years of toil in the fields, is nonetheless determined and commanding. After the Civil War, sharecropping, an economic system in which farmland was rented for a portion of the crops grown, trapped many African Americans in a cycle of subsistence-level poverty. Catlett’s dignified portrayal shifts the focus of traditional heroic portraiture, which is often reserved for the powerful or famous, by concentrating on someone who is poor and dispossessed. The implied placement of the viewer slightly below the sharecropper helps to ennoble the figure. In this print, Catlett made a powerful political statement about the enduring strength of even the most economically deprived. Sharecropper was cut into a linoleum block in 1957; the image became so popular that the artist has continued to print it on and off ever since in variants of the original. The Art Institute’s impression dates from 1970. (MF)

Elizabeth Catlett, a printmaker and a sculptor, considers the goal of her art to be the transformation of society. Addressing the National Conference of Negro Artists in 1961, she stated, “Whether we like it or not, we Negro artists are part of a worldwide struggle to change a situation that is unforgivable and untenable. . . .” 18 Born in Washington, D.C., Catlett attended Howard University, where she studied under the important African American art theorists Alain Locke and James A. Porter. In graduate school at the University of Iowa, she worked with the regionalist painter Grant Wood. In 1946 Catlett received a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant and used the money to travel to Mexico with Charles White (see no. 17), to whom she was then married. There she worked at the Taller de gráfica popular (The People’s Graphic Workshop), a printmaking collective dedicated to the principles of social realism, including the use of public art forms, such as murals, which are large and can be accessible to all, and of prints, which can be easily and cheaply disseminated, as agents for social change. Because of her belief in Communist ideals at a time when leftists were being persecuted by the United States’ House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee, Catlett remained in Mexico. Barred from 1962 to 1974 by the State Department from returning to the United States, she became a Mexican citizen in 1964 and married Francisco Mora, a colleague at the Taller.