Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of NMAAHC, who knew Catlett, says the generation that raised Catlett worked hard to teach their children that “they were somebody,” despite the segregation of the era. The sculptor has taken a wide nose and thick lips, often-mocked attributes of Black women, and exalted them. It’s a startling vision that evokes both modern womanhood and deep African ancestry. The figure’s eyes have no pupils Catlett has replaced them with hollow space, a choice that creates a piercing, haunting presence, while the turn of the chin is almost defiant. Today, the piece is in the collection at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Clayton curatorial fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says that whether Catlett made the terra-cotta sculpture in New York or Mexico City remains uncertain.
It was around this period that Catlett sculpted Head of a Negro Woman, inspired by her time teaching in Harlem, and particularly at a night school where the cultural revival of the Harlem Renaissance could still be felt.
Larry Morris, The Washington Post via Getty ImagesĪ crucial opportunity came in 1946, when she won a Rosenwald Fund fellowship that allowed her to work in Mexico City, which would serve as the artist’s home base off and on until her death. Sculptor-printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, photographed at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The art world was moving toward abstraction, yet Catlett in the 1940s was set on diving deeper into social realism, to portray Black experiences in America-Įspecially the experiences of Black women. When the couple moved to New York City in 1942, Catlett taught art at the George Washington Carver School, a night school for working adults in Harlem, where she found major inspiration for her work.Ĭatlett’s rapidly maturing style in sculptures and prints was shaped by the stories she’d heard from her grandmothers and sharpened by her experiences in Harlem, where she had seen a quiet, daily heroism that she was determined to capture in her work. She met her first husband, Charles Wilbert White, while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Graduating with honors in 1935, Catlett moved to Durham, North Carolina, to teach high school, and then to Iowa City, where she became the first Black woman to obtain an MFA from the University of Iowa. Catlett was quickly finding her voice, and her purpose. There she majored in design and was mentored by the artist Loïs Mailou Jones, who trained other prominent Black artists of the day, including David Driskell and Sylvia Snowden. Betty’s interest in art bloomed in high school, and she went on to study at Howard University. Her mother, Mary, served as a high school attendance officer while maintaining several other jobs to support Betty and her brother and sister. In the summers, Betty would visit her maternal grandparents in North Carolina, where she saw sharecroppers tilling hard ground and later recalled marveling at their perseverance in the face of “extreme poverty.” Portraying such people with dignity would become her artistic mission.īetty came of age during the first part of the Great Migration, in a well-educated household: Her father, John, who died before she was born, had taught mathematics at Tuskegee University in Alabama before the family moved to the nation’s capital. As a young girl, Elizabeth “Betty” Catlett-born in Washington, D.C., likely in 1915-spent a great deal of time with her grandparents, who had been born into slavery and who took care to teach the child about her people’s ongoing struggle for basic rights.
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