By Jean C. Florman - College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - The ...

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett
Her Vision,
Elizabeth Catlett
Her Way
By Jean Florman
By Jean C. Florman
Nothing in Elizabeth Catlett’s
childhood hinted that she would
grow up to be a world-renowned
artist. There were no artist role
models in her family, no moments
of grand epiphany in her formative
years.
Yet today, the 88-year-old
printmaker and sculptor can look
back on a remarkable body of work
that has bridged most of a century
and the cultures of two countries.
Galleries across the United States
have showcased her work. Her
prints and sculptures reside in
the collections of numerous museums,
including the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City, and
the National Museum of American
Art in Washington, D.C.
Catlett celebrates humanity by
drawing on elements of African,
African American, Native American,
and Mexican art to depict the
human form.
“Elizabeth Catlett’s work is at
once abstract and naturalistic,”
says Dorothy Johnson, director of
the School of Art and Art History
in the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences. “She is going to stand as
an extremely important influence
in the canon of American art for
the development of her style, the
themes she has chosen, and the
amazing depth and range of her
works and commissions.”
Howard Collinson, director of
the University of Iowa Museum
of Art, notes that Catlett’s artistic
finesse is widely recognized.
The University of Iowa 7

8 Arts & Sciences
“All of Catlett’s works—whether 18 inches
or four feet tall—are magnificently crafted. She
pays particular attention to surfaces, and even
the bronzes have a beautiful texture.”
Catlett was born in 1915. Her father, who had
taught mathematics at Tuskeegee University,
succumbed to tuberculosis shortly before Elizabeth
was born. Left with three children to support,
Elizabeth’s mother became a truant officer
in Washington, D.C. She taught her children to
follow their dreams by becoming educated, a
lesson she had learned from her own parents.
“Education was very important to my mother’s
parents, who had been slaves,” Catlett
says. “After the Civil War, they made sure that
all four of their sons graduated from university
and all four of their daughters graduated from
seminary school.”
Catlett followed suit. In 1935 she graduated
cum laude from Howard University with
a B.S. degree in printmaking, drawing, and art
history. She then became an educator herself,
teaching art in a North Carolina high school for
two years.
By 1938 she had decided to continue her
formal training at an artistic mecca in the Midwest.
At The University of Iowa, she studied
with sculptor Henry Stinson and regionalist
painter Grant Wood.
“Grant Wood was a very generous teacher,”
Catlett says, “and he influenced all my work.
He would tell his students, ‘Paint what you
know.’ ”
For Catlett, that mostly meant black women.
The mother-child bond, a recurring motif in her
work, was inspired by the strong bond with her
own mother and grandmothers.
“For Grant Wood’s class, I painted a young
girl ironing,” Catlett recalls. “My grandmother
taught me to iron. First I started with overalls,
then overall shirts. Then I finally graduated to
dress shirts. I’m a good ironer, so that’s what
I painted.”
While at Iowa, Catlett spent many 11-hour
days and weekends in the school’s art studios.
Her $35-per-month budgeted expenses
included $10 rent for a room in a local home.
At the time, African American students were
not allowed to live in University residence
halls, so the young artist roomed in the home
of a Mrs. Scott.
Catlett says that because she had grown
up in Washington, D.C., a city divided by clear
and unyielding race lines, Iowa’s combination
of openness and segregation
surprised her.
“I’d lived in an African
American culture my whole
life,” she says. “In Iowa City, I
suddenly was living among white
people, but I still couldn’t do things
like live in the dorms.”
Although Catlett excelled in her course
work, the University almost didn’t award
her a degree. Near the end of her final
semester, she was told that she could not
receive an M.F.A. because she had not taken
printmaking.
“The head of the department apparently
was unhappy because I had taken a bronze
foundry course at the College of Engineering
instead of printmaking,” she says. “I had
taken the engineering course to learn about
lost wax and sand casting.”
At the time, the school’s art gallery
was displaying Catlett’s graduate work,
including stone carvings, cast cement
nudes, a fresco painting, terra-cotta
masks, and a bronze mask—one of
the three pieces she created during
the engineering course. Catlett says
the issue still hadn’t been settled
by the day of her thesis defense,
and at the end of her defense,
her committee sent her out of
the room.
“I waited for the longest
time,” she says. “Finally, Grant
Wood came out and said, ‘Congratulations.
You have earned
your degree.’ ”

Catlett and two other students earned the
first M.F.A. degrees awarded by the University.
Her graduate thesis project, a stone carving of
a black mother and child, earned first prize in
Chicago’s 1940 American Negro Exposition
and then graced the University campus for
many years.
Following graduation, Catlett taught at several
schools, including Dillard University in
New Orleans, where she became head of the
art department. During a summer spent learning
ceramic techniques at the Art Institute of
Chicago, she met and married her first husband,
artist Charles White. In 1944 the couple
moved to New York City, where she served
two years as a fund-raiser and teacher at the
George Washington Carver School in Harlem.
“The people who came to the school worked
all day as laundresses, elevator operators, and
domestics, and then went to class from seven
to ten at night,” Catlett says. “We charged
three dollars a course, and most of the teachers
were volunteers.
“I discovered that these were the people
I wanted to create art for,” she adds. “These
were humble, hardworking, intelligent people,
hungry for culture and for education. They
embraced everything—authors who came to
visit the school, musicians from Juilliard, art at
the Metropolitan.”
During her tenure at the Carver School,
Catlett continued to mature as an artist. Russian
sculptor Ossip Zadkine, who was living in
New York, became her mentor. Her work was
exhibited in the New Orleans Museum of Art
and the Modern Art Museum of Mexico, and in
1945 she won the first of two grants from the
Julius Rosenwald Foundation. Catlett used the
grants to study public art in Mexico City.
Years before, a brief stint with the
Depression-era Public Works Administration
had sparked Catlett’s fascination with public
art. As a sophomore at Howard University,
she had been employed briefly by the PWA
as a muralist.
“I was supposed to paint a mural for the
dome of a local teacher’s college,” she recalls,
“but I had never seen a mural, and didn’t know
what one was supposed to look like. So I went
to school all week, worked on Friday nights,
and then spent Saturdays in the Congressional
Library looking up everything I could
find about murals. I became fascinated by the
murals of Diego Rivera, but never really understood
how I was supposed to actually create a
two-foot-high painting around a circular dome.
After five weeks, I was fired.”
Nevertheless, Catlett says, the experience
gave her two things: a love of large-scale public
art and an understanding that opportunities
should be seized. Both helped ease her into the
heady art world of mid-century Mexico, where
she moved in 1946. Catlett quickly became
part of the vibrant inner circle of Latin American
Social Realists that included Rivera, Frida
Kahlo, David Alfaro Siquerios, and painter
Francisco Mora. When Catlett and Mora fell
in love, she divorced her first husband. Mora
died in 2002, but the couple enjoyed 56 years
of marriage strengthened by shared artistic
ambitions, political passions, and parenthood.
In Mexico, Catlett found an environment
that welcomed and nurtured artists. She was
appointed the first woman to head the sculpture
department at the National School of
Fine Arts, in Mexico City, a position she held
from 1959 until 1976. Because she wanted
to exercise her political rights in her adopted
home, Catlett became a citizen of Mexico in
1962. Today she divides her time between her
Cuernavaca home outside Mexico City and an
apartment in New York City.
In 1996 The University of Iowa awarded
Catlett the Distinguished Alumni Award.
Iowa’s Museum of Art owns a Catlett linocut,
“Sharecropper (Cosechadora de algodon),”
and the University has commissioned a sixfoot-high
bronze statue for display on campus.
Above: “Sharecropper,” 1968, linocut, 25 9/16 x 19 12/16 inches,
University of Iowa Museum of Art, purchased by the friends of
Jean Davidson
Left: “Stepping Out,” 2000, bronze, 30 inches, courtesy of June
Kelly Gallery, New York City
Recently the artist won a competition to
honor African American writer Ralph Ellison.
Her 15-foot bronze will be installed in
New York City near the apartment where the
author’s widow still lives. Catlett also has been
commissioned to create three pieces honoring
civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell.
“When I went to Washington, D.C., to chat
about the work,” Catlett says, “I walked into
the meeting room and there were 15 people
sitting there telling me where the sculpture
was going to go, what it should look like, what
materials I should use. I let it go on for a while,
and then I said, ‘I’m not listening to you.’ They
were very surprised.”
There is no doubt Catlett is an artist to be
reckoned with. She continues to work every
day except Sunday, and until two years ago,
she still wielded a chain saw to rough out her
wood sculptures. Her humanism and compassion
for the ordinary individual suffuse every
curved arm cradling a child and sharp chin
tilted upward in grace and defiance. By following
Grant Wood’s gentle advice to “depict
what you know,” Catlett has used the language
of her own heritage and experience to speak to
the world.
The University of Iowa 9