Meet Elizabeth Catlett in 11 Facts

A sculptor, printmaker, feminist, and social activist, her long life spanned decades of societal upheaval and change, from Jim Crow segregation up to Barack Obama’s first term as president, and it is impossible to separate her art from her life and politics.

I have always wanted my art to service my people—to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.

—Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012)

Here are 11 facts about her lived experience that informed her revolutionary art.


1. Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, DC, in 1915 to parents who worked in education.

Her grandparents on both sides had been enslaved.

2. Although interested in art from an early age, Catlett pursued teaching as a career.

Denied a scholarship and admission to the Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, she graduated cum laude from Howard University. After supervising elementary schools in North Carolina, where she was paid less than her white colleagues, she enrolled in graduate school.

3. The first Black woman to earn a MFA from the University of Iowa, she studied with Grant Wood, best known for American Gothic.

Wood encouraged her to work with the subjects she knew best, particularly Black women. Along with other Black students, including the poet Margaret Walker, she lived off-campus as she was not permitted in the all-white dormitories.

4. Catlett’s sculpture Negro Mother and Child, her thesis project, won first prize for sculpture at the art exhibition of the American Negro Exposition in Chicago.

During her time in Chicago, she met many artists who shared her same progressive learnings, including her first husband, Charles White, and studied at the School of the Art Institute and the South Side Community Art Center.

5. She taught sculpture at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, an alternative school that served working people.

While in Harlem, she met many luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Aaron Douglass, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Jacob Lawrence, and many others.

6. She worked primarily in sculpture and prints, choosing the medium that best fit each subject.

Her works, characterized by bold lines and forms, were influenced by African sculpture to works by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth and German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz to Mexican graphic art. 

7. In 1946, she traveled to Mexico City to work with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), a print collective whose goals were to spread revolutionary ideas of social change.

Unlike most guest artists, Catlett became a permanent member, creating mostly woodblock and linocut prints with them for 20 years.

8. Catlett settled in Mexico and married the artist Francisco Mora, with whom she had three children.

With an artistic circle that included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, she lived in Mexico for the rest of her life, using her art to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women.

9. An investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s found her to be an “undesirable alien.”

 In 1962, she became a Mexican citizen.

10. The title of the Art Institute’s exhibition, “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” comes from a speech Catlett delivered in May 1970 from Mexico to attendees at the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art at Northwestern.

Catlett was supposed to speak in person at the event, but after she was denied a US visa, she delivered it by phone. “I was refused on the grounds that, as a foreigner, there was the possibility I would interfere in social or political problems, and thus, I constituted a threat to the well-being of the United States of America. To the degree and to the proportion that the United States constitute a threat to Black People, to the degree and more, do I hope I have earned that honor. I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies.” Catlett’s US citizenship was reinstated in 2002.

11. In 2005, Catlett was the inaugural recipient of the Art Institute’s Leadership Advisory Committee’s Legends and Legacy Award.

An exhibition of her work accompanied the celebration of her work and lasting impact on the art world.

The exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” runs August 30–January 4, 2026.

Learn more about Elizabeth Catlett and explore her works in the museum’s permanent collection.

Topics

• Collection
• Exhibitions
• Artists
• Modern Art
• Arts of America
• Prints and Drawings