Community as Catalyst: Elizabeth Catlett and Chicago

“I am Black, a woman, a sculptor and a printmaker. I am also married, the mother of three sons and the grandmother of five little girls. I am a teacher and a student. I was born in the United States and am now a citizen of Mexico, having lived there since 1946. I believe that these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today.”

Her art—from pointed political prints to lyrical sculptures in wood and stone—indeed reflects a wide range of influences derived from a lifelong habit of engaging with the art and people around her. 

One formative period in her life centered on the Midwest: two years spent in graduate school in Iowa and then a short but highly influential stay in Chicago. The city connected her with an established community of leftist Black artists, furthered her artistic education, honed her political instincts, and offered her important exhibition opportunities. 

Catlett was born in Washington, DC, and completed her undergraduate degree at Howard University. After teaching for several years in Durham, North Carolina, she was eager to advance her career and enrolled at the University of Iowa in 1938. Her instructor and advisor there was none other than the painter Grant Wood, whose American Gothic had propelled him to fame in 1930 when it was exhibited at and then acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Wood imparted several key lessons. First, he firmly believed that art should come from an artist’s authentic engagement with their own community, and he encouraged Catlett to focus on subjects from her own life, particularly Black women. He further suggested she take up sculpting; this advice resonated, and she began her lifelong commitment to rendering the human figure in three dimensions. Lastly, Wood urged her to push toward a more abstracted aesthetic, and she indeed began to explore angular, stylized forms in her work.

Beyond her mentorship from Wood, Catlett benefitted from her Iowa sojourn in another notable way: she had easy access to the artistic communities of Chicago. Her introduction to the city came in early 1940, when she made a “Picasso pilgrimage” with a group of fellow University of Iowa students to see Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, an extensive retrospective organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art and shown in Chicago from February 1 to March 3, 1940. It was an opportunity to see the breadth of Picasso’s oeuvre up to that point, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937). Given Wood’s advice to push her work toward abstraction, Catlett found the chance to study Picasso’s artwork compelling. Additionally, as a leftist artist with an interest in social justice, she found an inspiring model for political engagement in the mural Guernica.

But this Picasso pilgrimage had another long-lasting benefit in that it introduced her to the significant community of politically active, leftist Black artists who propelled what is now known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. The movement encompassed several forms of creative expression—not only literature and dance but also the visual arts centered around the nascent South Side Community Art Center. Catlett recalled, “I went to the exhibition and then someone took me to a party and I met Margaret and Bernard Goss, and Charles Sebree, and … a lot of the artists in Chicago at the time, and Charles White, and others.” This group saw their art as a weapon in the political fight for equality, and their dedication affirmed that Catlett was on the right path. Her 1940 visit to Chicago, therefore, immediately indicated to the young artist that the city had a great deal to offer in terms of artistic and personal growth. 

A key exhibition opportunity came just a few months after her Picasso pilgrimage, when Catlett’s thesis sculpture for the University of Iowa, Negro Mother and Child, was presented at the art exhibition of the American Negro Exposition in Chicago and won first prize for sculpture. The massive presentation opened on July 4, 1940, in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment. One of many emancipation expositions that took place across the country, it showcased the economic, political, and cultural progress of African Americans through hundreds of displays ranging from historical dioramas to agricultural and other educational offerings.

Chicago’s fair in particular reflected the strong leftist political leanings of the city’s Black cultural workers, who played a key role in shaping the display of visual arts. The exhibition’s jurists selected a sweeping array of historical and contemporary painting, sculpture, and works on paper, along with a small selection of African objects. Negro Mother and Child was Catlett’s first attempt to represent in stone what would become one of her most important themes: “The implications of motherhood, especially Negro motherhood,” she wrote, “are quite important to me, as I am a Negro as well as a woman.” Catlett’s career was on the rise. 

Catlett graduated with her master’s in fine arts from the University of Iowa in 1940 and was named chair of the art department at Dillard University in New Orleans, but she returned to Chicago in the summer of 1941. She roomed and shared a studio there with Margaret Taylor Goss (later Burroughs) and quickly became a notable part of Black Chicago’s social and artistic scene. “We would meet at each other’s houses,” Catlett recalled, “and we would get together socially and discuss … creative things. People would read and we would look at each other’s work.” She dedicated her summer to perfecting her craft.

No works by Catlett can be confirmed to be extant from her time in Chicago, but she recalled the summer as productive: “It was a very fulfilling summer … I felt like I was progressing.” She enrolled in a ceramics course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied lithography at the South Side Community Art Center. She also remembered working on a stone carving, very possibly Head (Head of a Man), now in the Art Institute’s collection. 

Catlett married Charles White in December 1941, and they moved to New York the following month. (The couple divorced in 1946.) Although she would never live in Chicago again, the community she joined here followed her in spirit, encouraging her to continue along the path of art and activism. This approach guided her as she stepped into the next phase of her life in New York City, and later, when she moved to Mexico.

Elizabeth Catlett: “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” opening to members August 28, invites you to trace Catlett’s life and work across these places as it chronicles her lifelong dedication to social justice.

—Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president, Curatorial Strategy

This article is adapted from the author’s essay “Social(ist) Networks in Chicago and New York” in the catalogue for this exhibition, Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Sponsors

Elizabeth Catlett: “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” is made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Major support for the Chicago presentation is provided by the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation, Elisabeth and William Landes, and Dr. Peggy A. Montes.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

Topics

• Exhibitions
• Artists
• Arts of America
• Chicago