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Elizabeth CatlettKEISHA M. Hand Drawn Lithograph, Young Black Female Portrait, Afro Hairstyle2008
2008
About the Item
KEISHA M. is an original hand drawn, limited edition lithograph by the renowned African-American woman sculptor, printmaker and painter Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), printed using hand lithography techniques on archival paper - Somerset Velvet, 100% acid free. KEISHA M. portrays an intimate pencil drawn portrait of a young black woman with curly, half up half down afro hairstyle dressed in a deep blue suede-like top. Keisha's face has an almost sculptural appearance with a central line dividing the face into two halves. KEISHA M. is a fresh, modern contemporary portrait expressing the natural beauty and dignity of black women by one of the premier American women artists of the twentieth century - Elizabeth Catlett.
Print size: 28 x 21.75 inches, unframed, mint condition, pencil signed by Elizabeth Catlett
Image size: 17.75 x 15.25 inches
Year Published: 2008, printed at JK Fine Art Editions Co., NJ
Edition Size: 100
Artist statement:
No other field is closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.
— Elizabeth Catlett, 1973
About the artist -
Elizabeth Catlett (born April 15, 1915, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 2, 2012, Cuernavaca, Mexico), American-born Mexican sculptor and printmaker renowned for her intensely political art.
Catlett, a granddaughter of enslaved people, was born into a middle-class Washington family; her father was a professor of mathematics at Tuskegee Institute. After being disallowed entrance into the Carnegie Institute of Technology because she was Black, Catlett enrolled at Howard University (B.S., 1935), where she studied design, printmaking, and drawing and was influenced by the art theories of Alain Locke and James A. Porter. While working as a muralist for two months during the mid-1930s with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, she became influenced by the social activism of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.
In 1940 Catlett became the first student to earn a master of fine arts degree in sculpture at the University of Iowa. The Regionalist painter Grant Wood, a professor at the university at the time, encouraged her to present images drawn from Black culture and experience and influenced her decision to concentrate on sculpture. After Catlett held several teaching positions while continuing to expand her range of media, she went to Mexico City in 1946 to work at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artists’ collective. There, along with her then husband, the artist Charles White, she created prints depicting Mexican life. As a left-wing activist, she underwent investigation by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s. In 1962 she took Mexican citizenship.
Catlett was known largely for her sculpture, especially for works such as Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and various mother-child pairings, the latter of which became one of her central themes. She was also an accomplished printmaker who valued prints for their affordability and hence their accessibility to many people. Catlett alternately chose to illustrate famous subjects, such as Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, and anonymous workers—notably, strong solitary Black women—as depicted in the terra-cotta sculpture Tired (1946). Other notable works include the linocuts Sharecropper (1968) and Survivor (1983) and the lithograph Negro es bello (1968; “Black Is Beautiful”). She remained a working artist into her 90s.
-The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica
- Creator:Elizabeth Catlett (1915 - 2012, American)
- Creation Year:2008
- Dimensions:Height: 28 in (71.12 cm)Width: 21.75 in (55.25 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Mint condition, unframed, pencil signed, titled, and dated by Elizabeth Catlett, hand torn edges, printers chop mark embossed on lower left, print documentation/Certificate of Authenticity provided, from the master printers private collection.
- Gallery Location:Union City, NJ
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU832310488962
Elizabeth Catlett
Promoting social change was Elizabeth Catlett’s prime motivation as an artist. The granddaughter of enslaved people, Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915 and spent her adult life driven to create sculptures, prints and paintings that would reach, celebrate and uplift those who were barely visible in art.
“I have always wanted my art to service Black people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential,” Catlett said of her work in the 1978 book Art: African American. She studied art history, drawing and other disciplines at Howard University, and as an MFA student at the University of Iowa, her mentor, the painter Grant Wood, advised her to “take as her subject what she knew best.” As she later told an interviewer, “The thing that I knew the most about was Black women, because I am one, and I lived with them all my life, so that’s what I started working with.”
The centerpiece of Catlett’s spring 1940 thesis project, Negro Mother and Child — a figure of a Black mother embracing her child, carved from Indiana limestone — was awarded first place for sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago held that year.
Catlett taught art at Dillard University in New Orleans — where she battled discrimination daily — and met her first husband, artist Charles White, while living in Chicago. She resigned from Dillard in 1942 and moved to New York City. There Catlett befriended painter Jacob Lawrence and studied lithography and other media at the Art Students League. Inspired by her studies with Ossip Zadkine, she began to incorporate abstract forms into her wood and stone sculptures.
In 1946, a grant supported her travel to Mexico to study its murals and graphic art. As Catlett had experienced the barbaric and deeply destructive system of racial segregation that the Jim Crow laws enforced in the United States, Mexico felt like a welcome escape. She would make the country her home and create much of her work there, divorcing White and marrying painter and printmaker Francisco Mora of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop), or TGP, in 1947. She collaborated with TGP, a graphic arts workshop dedicated to social issues located in Mexico City, on a number of works, including one of her best-known linoleum cut prints, Sharecropper (1952). The heroic depiction of an anonymous farm worker was intended to draw attention to the plight of Black tenant farmers who were ruthlessly exploited by the era’s white landowners.
Another iconic work of Catlett’s is Black Unity (1968), a raised fist sculpted from cedar, smooth and gleaming, with one side taking the form of two faces that resemble carved African masks. In the same year, the raised fist, a powerful symbol of the Civil Rights struggle and emblem of the Black Power movement, had been immortalized by two Black American athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who raised their black-gloved fists during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
Catlett was a professor of sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1958 until 1976, when she retired to focus on making art, exhibiting extensively in the years that followed. In 2003, she completed the Ralph Ellison Memorial in New York’s Riverside Park. That same year she received a lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center. Her work is in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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