Mariane Ibrahim is honored to announce the representation of Elizabeth Catlett (American and Mexican, 1915–2012), one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose extraordinary seven-decade practice transformed modern sculpture and printmaking. The gallery will unveil a solo exhibition of Elizabeth Catlett in November 2027 in Chicago to inaugurate the new representation.
Historic solo exhibitions include Experiencia Negra: Escultura y Grabado de Elizabeth Catlett, Museo de Arte Moderno, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (1970); Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, NY (1998), travelled to Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (1999), Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico (1999), The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (1999); and Elizabeth Catlett: Prints and Sculpture, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1971).
In recent years, Catlett's work has been the subject of renewed institutional attention. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, brought together more than 150 works and traveled from the Brooklyn Museum (2024–25) to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2025), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2025–26). This notice continues with The Art of Elizabeth Catlett: From the Collection of Samella Lewis, an exhibition drawn from the collection of Catlett's former student, lifelong friend, and fellow artist and scholar Samella Lewis, currently on view at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit through 2027.
“The racial and gender inequalities, struggles for workers' rights, restrictions on political freedom, and questions of belonging that Catlett confronted throughout her lifetime remain global realities today. It is an honor to support her legacy and celebrate her work which consequently reaches us not only as a record of the twentieth century, but as a voice of striking contemporary resonance.” – Mariane Ibrahim
The gallery’s representation of Elizabeth Catlett recognizes this expansive legacy and the particular resonance of an artist whose life connected the United States and Mexico for more than sixty years. Working closely with The Elizabeth Catlett Mora Family Living Trust, the gallery will support scholarship, exhibitions, and institutional engagement dedicated to deepening the understanding of Catlett's work across the multiple histories to which it belongs.
For Catlett, these histories could never be separated neatly. As she told Ebony in 1970, “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”
Born in Washington, D.C., Catlett came of age within the realities of racial segregation in the United States. She was denied admission to the Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race before studying at Howard University and becoming, in 1940, the first African American woman to receive an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her artistic and political consciousness developed within the vibrant networks of Black artists and intellectuals she encountered in Washington D.C., Chicago, and New York, and through an understanding of art as inseparable from the communities and struggles from which it emerged.
At the center of Elizabeth Catlett’s work is Black women.“Because I am a woman and know how a woman feels in body and mind,” Catlett explained, “I sculpt, draw, and print women, generally black women.” Across sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, she represented women as mothers and workers, organizers and historical actors. At a moment when Black women remained largely absent from the history of Western art, Catlett insisted on visibilizing their lives and struggles.
This commitment was rooted in Catlett's own family history. She grew up with the stories of her grandmother, born into slavery, and of earlier generations of her family who had endured enslavement. Her mother, a social worker in Washington, D.C., brought home accounts of the exploitation and hardship experienced by Black women in the city. “I grew up with this in the background of my mind,” Catlett later recalled.
Art and political engagement were inseparable, and throughout her life she advocated for racial and gender equality, workers' rights, and political freedom. During the Cold War, her associations with leftist artists and organizations brought her under the scrutiny of the United States government, which revoked her passport in 1955. Catlett nevertheless refused to retreat from the political commitments that informed her work. This experience of arbitrary exclusion reinforced an understanding already fundamental to her practice: that dignity, freedom, and the right to representation could neither be conferred nor withdrawn by those in power.
In 1946, thirty-one-year-old Elizabeth Catlett arrived in Mexico on a Julian Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to create prints depicting Black women's experiences, and what began as a temporary stay became a six-decade home and a profound reorientation of her life and practice. She had encountered Mexican art earlier, as a Howard University student, through reproductions of Diego Rivera's murals in professor James Porter's library, an early glimpse of a tradition where art, politics, and public life were inseparableand once in Mexico she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective of revolutionary printmakers dedicated to accessible art and to reclaiming local history and indigenous identity. Rather than diminishing her connection to African American life, her time abroad let her see continuities between struggles against racism, colonialism, and political and economic oppression across borders, so that, as art historian Shifra M. Goldman noted, she never lost her interest in portraying Black history and contemporary life even as she identified deeply with Mexico's artistic movements and people.
Her embrace of Mexico added another layer to this consciousness. Catlett became a Mexican citizen in 1962 and built a life there with artist Francisco Mora (1922-2002), with whom she raised three sons. She taught for nearly two decades at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, eventually becoming head of its sculpture department. Her relationship to Mexico was neither incidental nor simply expatriate. Mexican critics recognized her as belonging simultaneously to both traditions. Ignacio Márquez Rodiles described her as “as Mexican as she is proud of her Black race,” while Raquel Tibol later wrote that perhaps no artist had embodied as fully “the human and artistic experience of being simultaneously African American and Mexican.”
Her influence now extends across generations. Catlett's example has been particularly important to artists working with the Black figure, politically engaged printmaking, and representations of Black womanhood, while her life offered another kind of precedent: that of an artist for whom aesthetic ambition, political commitment, teaching, motherhood, and participation in community were not competing identities but mutually sustaining ones.
