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

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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
Page 1: Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett

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

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