Civil Rights from D.C. to Mexico: Elizabeth Catlett at La Salle

Art can influence people and change the world. That’s what sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett believed. To celebrate that and the 100th anniversary of her birth, La Salle University Art Museum offers Elizabeth Catlett: Art for Social Justice. Viewers will see 24 prints, mixed media, and sculptures, including eight pieces from the University’s collection and 16 works on loan from private collectors, museums, and galleries, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The strength of marginalized people

Catlett was an African-American and Mexican woman born to middle-class parents in Washington, D.C. in 1915. The granddaughter of slaves, Catlett used her art to shine a light on issues surrounding equal rights, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and oppressed peoples. She also endeavored to show people of color and their everyday lives, particularly as mothers and as families. She sought to celebrate the strength and endurance of the marginalized and underprivileged, says curator Klare Scarborough, Ph.D., the Museum’s Director and Chief Curator (who co-curated the exhibit with Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History).

Catlett, who attended Howard University, then earned the first MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa in 1940, participated in the Harlem Renaissance and the Mexican Taller de Gráfica Popular movement. While there, she met her second husband, Francisco Mora (whose work, with other artists, is featured in an accompanying exhibit “Mexican People: Lithographs of the Taller de Gráfica Popular”). She lived the rest of her life in Mexico, continuing to create new work based on issues in both her country of origin and of choice throughout (she died in 2012).

The exhibition

Scarborough curated the exhibit more or less chronologically, so people can see Catlett’s progression. The lithograph Mother and Child (1944) came from Catlett’s desire to represent particularly black women and their roles as mothers and nurturers, Scarborough said. In the sculpture Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), a woman is walking or standing with her left hand clenched, her right hand raised behind her head, and her eyes looking straight forward. The figure portrays the strength, defiance, and power of black women, Scarborough said. And Children with Flowers (1995), which features an older black woman embracing children of varying races, shows Catlett focusing on multiculturalism, Scarborough said. Catlett’s work, which became more colorful in her later years, seemed influenced by her own children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as the world around her becoming more accepting, Scarborough said.

The one thing that remained the same throughout Catlett’s career is that she used her art to speak to and for people, Scarborough said: “As Catlett recounted to a former student, ‘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.’”

See “Elizabeth Catlett: Art for Social Justice” and “Mexican People: Lithographs of the Taller de Gráfica Popular” through June 4 at La Salle University Art Museum’s Olney Hall, 1900 W. Olney Avenue, Philadelphia. Museum hours are 10am-4pm Monday through Friday (also noon to 3pm on May 16). For more information, call 215-951-1221 or visit online.

Image: Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), El Derecho al Pan (The Right to Eat), 1954, 15 5/8” x 11 7/8”, Lithograph, Collection of La Salle University Art Museum, Art © Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.