The artist who left a racist Pittsburgh and became a major painter somewhere else
Elizabeth Catlett was born in April and died in April — 96 years later. In between, the legendary African American became a racially discriminatedagainst internationally renowned woman of the visual arts.
Because of her race, she was denied a competitively won 1930s scholarship to study at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology. Success was her decades-long revenge.
A prodigy
Born on April 15, 1915, in Washington D.C., the granddaughter of formerly enslaved grandparents, Alice Elizabeth Catlett grew to be an art prodigy. As a teenager, she entered and won a national art competition in 1932, the award for which was the aforementioned Carnegie Tech (today’s Carnegie Mellon University) scholarship.
When the school learned that she was Black, she was denied admission to the science and art institution.
Undeterred, the wunderkind went on to earn a 1937 cum laude degree from Howard University, the federally-chartered Black school in her hometown. She continued her education and earned a master’s degree with honors at predominately white University of Iowa in 1940. There, she was taught by the “American Gothic” painter, Grant Wood.
Propelled by her distinguished education, Catlett triumphed as painter, printmaker and sculptor. She both created art and taught it.
A bevy of teachers, mentors and inspirations encouraged her to create art based on what ‘’she knew best’’: Black women and children.
Her depictions of children with full-figured women give evidence that this advice was honored, as her signature figurative renderings of ample females appear in various media.
She was also encouraged to create abstract images by Russian sculptor Ossipe Zadkine. Of course, ebony was often selected because the creator regarded its color as a natural for her subjects.
Catlett’s teaching led her back to the African American community. She taught at Dillard University, the private African American New Orleans institution. She continued her studies during summers in Chicago, where she met her first husband, artist Charles White.
They moved to New York. In Harlem she taught adult art classes at the Carver School and met Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Ellison and other creative and intellectual giants during the post-Harlem Renaissance.
Teaching and politics
As American art headed more toward the abstract, Elizabeth Catlett moved in 1946 with her husband to accept a Rosenwald Fund fellowship to study in Mexico.
She soon divorced him and married muralist Francisco Mora in 1947, as she became more and more drawn to social movement matters. The couple had three sons together. Son David Mora became her assistant.
Catlett thrived in Mexico, becoming a professor of the faculty of art and design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She was the first woman to head the sculpture department there. The school was her final academic home from 1958 until her retirement in 1975.
But Professor Catlett also became enmeshed in political causes and was arrested. Later, she was not allowed back into the United States and was declared an “undesirable alien.” She renounced her citizenship in 1962 and became a Mexican citizen. She was allowed to return after 1970.
In a 2007 talk to a youth group in Pittsburgh, Tyra Butler, a board of directors member of Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center for African American Culture, recounted the 1932 CMU disgrace against Elizabeth Catlett. The account eventually reached and enraged CMU’s president, Jared Cohon. He presented Professor Catlett with an honorary doctoral degree in 2008.
A one-woman show was part of the artist’s triumphant reengagement with Pittsburgh. Cochairs were PNC bankers Stephanie and Michael Jasper, Highmark Foundation President Yvonne Cook and community leader Claudette Lewis, as well as Tyra Butler. The group published a catalog for the show.
The exhibition was presented at the E&S Gallery of the then Regina Gouger Miller Gallery on the CMU campus. Catlett’s son accompanied his vindicated mother.
Even so, I inquired into the legend’s reason for participating. “I required” a show and sale, was her quick reply. At that point, her works were commanding tens of thousands of dollars each.
In the MET and MOMA
That work is included in collections in Mexico and the United States. The University of Iowa bought 27 of her pieces. She donated the proceeds to a scholarship fund for Black and Latinx Iowa students. The school also named a residence hall in her honor.
In addition to Iowa and CMU, her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, the Detroit Institute of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art among many others.
Elizabeth Catlett died on April 2, 2012, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.