2001

I Have Special Reservations
Woodcut
1946



Bread
Linocut
1968

Malcom X Speaks for Us
Color Linocut
1969



Latch Key Child
Serigraph
1988

Three Women of America
Serigraph
1990

More than seventy works on paper by internationally renowned artist Elizabeth Catlett will be on view at the North Carolina Central University Art Museum in Durham, N.C., February 11- April 6, 2001. Elizabeth Catlett: Master Artist will bring Catlett's work back to Durham, where it first appeared more than fifty years ago, when Catlett taught at Hillside High School. The exhibition comes from the collection of Moore Energy Resources in Washington, DC owned by Reverend Douglas E. Moore. It is the largest privately held collection of her work in this country.

Elizabeth Catlett, born in Washington, D.C. in 1915, is widely acknowledged as a major presence in African American art, and her work is celebrated as a visually eloquent expression of African American identity and pride in cultural heritage. But this is not the whole story. she has lived in Mexico for fifty years, as a citizen of that country since 1962, and she and her husband, artist Francisco Mora, have raised their children there. For more than twenty years she was a member of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop) and she was the first woman professor of sculpture at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Her extraordinary career has stretched from her years as a student at Howard University during the 1930s through various political and social movements-- including the Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s, the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Mexican Public Art Movement, and feminism--which have informed her art.

Works in the exhibition will cover a fifty-year period (from 1946-2000) in Catlett's career. Themes will reflect her concerns for social injustice, the human condition and her life as an African-American woman and mother. Included will be works from Catlett's first major project, The Negro Woman's series. Several of the fifteen linoleum cuts about working women produced at the Taller de Graphica will be shown. A special tribute is paid to slave women who overcame horrendous circumstances after being brought to American in shackles in the works "In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes" and "In Phillis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery."

Lithographs, another printmaking medium mastered by Catlett, will be represented in such works as "Black Maternity" and "Rebozos." In both she effortlessly exploits a wide range of lights and darks in modeling faces. Serigraphs, another medium included in the exhibition, will be represented in "Homage to the Panthers" and "Malcom X Speaks for Us." These works will show that Catlett also directed her art toward the burgeoning Black Power movement of the mid 1960s. Her voice was among the earliest to call attention to the injustices and racism facing Black Americans.

Serigraph prints from the 1990s will show Catlett's willingness to return to a printmaking oeuvre used throughout her career. Works such as "Three Women of America" will pay homage to Catlett's African, African American and Mexican heritage and introduce a different figural stylization. In addition to the prints, there will also be several sculptures in bronze, including a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King.

This exhibition is the largest public display every held in North Carolina of this internationally prominent artist. Quoting Kenneth G. Rodgers, Director of the North Carolina Central University Art Museum, "We are extremely grateful to Reverend Douglas Moore who had the vision and desire to collect Elizabeth Catlett's work for so many years. Second, we are appreciative that he has agreed to share them with us." We are also grateful that Elizabeth Catlett has been unwavering in her commitment to consistently producing art of such high quality. Her painstaking use of printmaking to address identity and social justice remains the standard that others are judged by. The NCCU Art Museum is proud to share her work with Durham, the greater Research Triangle Community, and the state of North Carolina."


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