Foreword

Cuno, James

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Foreword

James Cuno

Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People

~Elizabeth Catlett was born in our nation’s capital in 1915, the granddaughter of slaves. She graduated from Howard University, having studied design, drawing, printmaking, and art history. After a two-year stint teaching high school in North Carolina, she enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she was influenced by, among others, the regionalist...

Author

James Cuno

PublisherArt Institute of Chicago

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00044.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16578

Foreword

Elizabeth Catlett was born in our nation’s capital in 1915, the granddaughter of slaves. She graduated from Howard University, having studied design, drawing, printmaking, and art history. After a two-year stint teaching high school in North Carolina, she enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she was influenced by, among others, the regionalist landscape and figure painter Grant Wood.

It was at Iowa that Catlett began to make sculpture, and her Mother and Child of 1940 received first prize at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the same year in which she became the first student to earn an M.F.A. degree in sculpture from the University of Iowa.

In 1946 a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled Catlett to travel to Mexico City, where she worked at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. There she began the series of prints that came to comprise The Negro Woman, a profound account of the conditions, both banal and heroic, in which the African American woman lived and worked. She has lived in both the United States and Mexico ever since.

Without question, Catlett is one of America’s great artists of compassion, with a unique artistic, expressive vocabulary giving form to the dignity of the human condition, and especially that of the people with whom she most identifies: the African American and Mexican woman. Her powerful use of the carved line in prints and the carved form in sculpture lends an air of immediacy to her art. In both her prints and sculpture, one finds the representation of human dignity born of honest work in the face of arbitrary social constraints.

With this publication, we mark the legendary achievement of Elizabeth Catlett as an eloquent artist of expressive form as well as deep and sincere humane content. The Leadership Advisory Committee of the Art Institute, a group of leaders of Chicago’s African American community, established the Legends and Legacy Award in 2005 and unanimously chose Elizabeth Catlett as its first recipient.

The Art Institute is proud to join the Leadership Advisory Committee in presenting this award, just as we express our appreciation to the Committee for making possible our acquisition of five prints by the artist. The Art Institute is dedicated to artists. It is for their art, and for the public on whose behalf we work, that we dedicate all of our human and material resources. Artists are a precious resource, and Elizabeth Catlett, as an accomplished artist and a human being of long life and consistent dedication to the struggles of people everywhere to live a dignified life, is without question worthy of our first Legends and Legacy Award.

We are deeply grateful to Elizabeth Catlett for accepting this award, and to the Leadership Advisory Committee—especially its chair, Denise B. Gardner, and Joan F. Small, chair of the Celebration Committee—for their guidance and support. We are equally grateful to Mark Pascale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, and scholar Melanie Anne Herzog, author of this publication.

The Legends and Legacy Award is presented with all humility, knowing that to be a legend is to have lived a life, professionally and personally, to which we should all aspire, now and forever.

James Cuno

President and Eloise W. Martin Director
The Art Institute of Chicago

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