An expat's prints cut to the core

For the first time since the 1940s, Elizabeth Catlett returned to Chicago in November. In town to accept the first Legends and Legacy Award presented by the Art Institute, which recently acquired five new Catlett prints, the expat artist spoke to a packed house at the ceremony .

"In the paintings I'd seen of black women, they were either exotic, or they were waiting on someone," she told the crowd. "Where were the heroic women I knew in Harlem? The ones who were working and bringing up kids?"

Born in our nation's capital in 1915, Catlett grew up listening to her grandmother's accounts of slavery and her mother's stories of anguish in the slums of D.C. Catlett attended Howard University, where she studied with some of the legends of African-American art: James Lesesne Wells, James Porter and James Herring, to name a few. From there, Catlett taught for two years in the public schools of Durham, North Carolina, where she worked with future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to gain equal pay for black teachers. Next, she was off to the University of Iowa for graduate studies.

"I'd never been around white people ever in my life," Catlett recalled.

One of two black students at Iowa, Catlett studied with Grant Wood who, aside from teaching her meticulous artistic processes, implored her to make art about that which she knew best. Catlett spent the summer of 1941 studying ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lithography at the South Side Community Art Center, which was becoming the hub of the city's booming community of black artists.

In 1946, she received a Rosenwald Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Mexico to work at the Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP) on what would become her best-known work: a series of 15 linoleum cuts titled The Negro Woman. In the series, three of which are on display, Catlett tells a story of strength through adversity using the first person. "I am the Negro Woman," reads the small handwriting on the bottom of the first image, a close-cropped linocut. "I have always worked hard in America" reveals the thankless work of those whose lives are spent in service of others. "In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom" gives us an image of a larger-than-life Tubman, heroically pointing the way to a brighter future. Special Houses is a brooding image of two women outside what appears to be tenement housing.

The images Catlett produced at the TGP owe much to the Mexican muralist tradition. However, her relationship with the group would prove problematic as the TGP was labeled a "communist front organization" by the U.S., and she was barred from entering the States. Ironically, it was later the threat of deportation that led to her application for Mexican citizenship.

After considerable effort, Catlett was granted a visa to attend the opening of her solo show in Harlem in 1971. Inspired by the climate of black empowerment at the time, she renamed her famous series of linocuts, I Am the Black Woman.

Art scholar Melanie Anne Herzog writes in her biography of Catlett: "Informed by her transnational perspective, her prints from this period—now including serigraphs and monoprints—manifest the affinity Catlett felt for the Black Arts Movement's visual expression of black identity, pride in African ancestry, and the revolutionary promise of Black Power." This is not work that one typically finds at "the 'tute."

Does this long-overdue recognition for the 90-year-old Catlett mark a new era for the Eurocentric Art Institute of Chicago? Throughout the 20th century, its school has been the training ground for many of the nation's most revered black artists, yet they've been underrepresented by the museum. In the years to come, we're hoping not to look back on this tribute as tokenism, but as the beginning of a new era for Chicago's great museum.

"Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People" is at the Art Institute through April 23.