BAIA BITS

Little Moments Where Knowledge Meets Art

“Are we here to communicate? Are we here for cultural interchange? Then let us not be narrow. Let us not be small or selfish. Let us aspire to be as great in our communication as the forefathers of our people whose struggles made our being here possible…”

Those are the bold words of iconic artist, Elizabeth Catlett, in her 1961 keynote address to the Third Annual Meeting of the National Conference of Negro Artists in Washington, DC. One year later, Catlett—who, by that time, had lived in Mexico for more than a decade and spoken out against social injustices in the US—officially became a Mexican citizen, a move prompting the American government to label the activist an “undesirable alien” and deny her entry to the United States. Though barred from her home country for the remainder of the 1960s, Catlett’s provocative work proclaimed solidarity with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements while highlighting the important role of women. In 1971, after being featured in various American media and invited by numerous institutions to exhibit her work domestically, Catlett was finally granted a visa to attend the opening of her solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

While her U.S. citizenship would ultimately be restored in 2002, the sculptor and printmaker didn’t need a passport to know what life as a Black American entailed. Born in Washington, DC in 1915 to a mother who worked as a school truant officer, Catlett never met her father, a math professor at the Tuskegee Institute who had died several months before her birth. As a child, her mother schooled her on the harsh realities of racism and poverty facing the Black community while her grandmothers told her stories of slavery. This exposure would instill an early sense of social justice and awareness in the artistic youth and plant the seeds for her subsequent artistic perspective.

“Harriet” by Elizabeth Catlett. 12 1/4 x 10 inches, linoleum cut on cream wove paper (1975) — framed

Graduating from Washington’s Dunbar High School in 1931, Catlett attended Howard University where she studied art under such notables figures as James Herring, Lois Mailou Jones, James Wells, and James Porter. Upon graduating with honors, she taught art for two years in Durham, North Carolina where she organized with Thurgood Marshall to promote equal pay for Black teachers. After leaving Durham to attend graduate school in art at the University of Iowa, Catlett was awarded the university’s first Master of Fine Arts in sculpture, and her thesis exhibition, “Negro Mother and Child,” won the First Award in Sculpture at the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago.

In the mid-1940s, after teaching art at Dillard University in New Orleans and marrying prominent artist, Charles White, Catlett traveled to Mexico under a Rosenwald Fellowship to pursue her interest in the murals and graphic art of the country’s post-revolutionary period. Her marriage to White would end and Catlett would relocate to Mexico and join up with a group of international artists that included Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. There, for over a half-century, Catlett taught art, challenged oppression, and produced an extraordinary body of work focused on social justice, Black women’s labor, historical heroines, and racial and gender equity.

Elizabeth Catlett, a recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, honors, and awards, died in 2012 at the age of 96 in her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Her life and work are currently the subject of the group exhibition, “Elizabeth Catlett: Points of Contact,” on display now through Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022 at the SCAD Museum of Art’s Evans Center for African American Studies in Savannah, GA.

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Stephanie Robinson, Esq. is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a national media figure, author, former Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and former President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focusing on democracy. Ms. Robinson hosted her own national radio show, Roundtable with Stephanie Robinson, a popular weekly 30-minute, talk-radio program focused on culture, politics, and relationships that aired on TSN. For over half a decade, Ms. Robinson was Political and Social Commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show where she spoke to between 9 and 10 million people weekly, offering her perspective on the day’s most pressing social and political issues.

Robinson is co-author of Accountable: Making America as Good as Its Promise, (Atria Books, 2009). She is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to social policy, women, race, family, and electoral politics. She was featured as one of the 30 Young Leaders of the Future in Ebony Magazine and was profiled in the book As I Am: Young African American Women in a Critical Age, by Julian Okwu. Robinson is a frequent speaker expressing her views in countless media outlets including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, C-Span, Fox News, NewsOne and NPR.

Stephanie was a Member of President Clinton’s first Mission to Africa regarding children orphaned by AIDS. Robinson, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland and the Harvard Law School, is a native of Steubenville, Ohio. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

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