Elizabeth Catlett, who will be 93 on April 15, is a living legend among American artists. Inspired by a lifelong commitment to social justice, she spent the last 60 years of the 20th century developing a formidable body of work in several mediums. Virtually every piece she has made reflects her strong sociopolitical convictions, and most of them also highlight her identity as a black American woman.
On Saturday Catlett is scheduled to be in Winston-Salem for a public conversation with a literary counterpart among living legends, author Maya Angelou, a Winston-Salem resident. Their exchange is to start at 6:30 p.m. at the Delta Arts Center, where they will be surrounded by 39 pieces of Catlett's art spanning more than 50 years.
These works make up the center's show "Solitude and Solidarity: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett," on view through April 19. Most of them are on loan from Douglas Moore and Doris Hughes-Moore, who live in Washington, Catlett's birthplace. Moore is a Methodist minister who grew up in Hickory and attended N.C. Central University, and his wife is a veterinarian, according to Dianne Caesar, the Delta Arts Center's director.
Catlett's last solo show here was a traveling retrospective of her prints that came to Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery in late 1995 and 1996. Before that, she had a smaller exhibit in 1986 at the Delta Arts Center's former home on East Third Street.
Catlett and Angelou have met for a public conversation once before, in New York in 1983, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, according to Caesar.
Catlett graduated from Howard University at 20 and earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa at 25. Early in her career, she taught at high schools in Durham and New York, and she was married to fellow artist Charles White from 1941 to 1947. She began to come into her own as an artist in the late 1940s, while spending increasing amounts of time in Mexico. There she worked alongside printmakers including Francisco Mora, who became her second husband and the father of her three sons.
After becoming a Mexican citizen in 1962, Catlett was for many years prohibited from returning to the United States due to strict immigration laws, which weren't revised until the early 1980s -- a situation that may have been complicated by her socialistic political views. After 1980, she and Mora were granted permanent visas to this country and, after 1982, they maintained residences in both New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico. Mora died in 2002.
The exhibition at Delta contains two small, relatively recent sculptures but otherwise consists of prints. The earliest ones are 11 small linocuts from Catlett's "New Negro Woman" series, which she created in Mexico in 1946 and 1947 as commentaries on the hardships and inequalities faced by black women in the United States. These include heroic portraits of Sojourner Truth and Harriett Tubman as well as images of anonymous, noble-looking women working at low-wage jobs.
The most dramatically powerful image in the series is the one titled ....and a special fear for my loved ones, depicting a dead man with a noose around his neck, lying on the ground at the feet of three otherwise unseen men. The figures in this series are subtly stylized to emphasize their expressive faces and gestures.
More overtly stylized, although dating from the same period, is the Domestic Worker portrayed in Catlett's lithograph of that title. Distinguished by an elongated neck, the woman wears a stoic expression as she stands holding a cleaning cloth in one hand and a mop or broom handle in the other.
Catlett gave a similarly stoic expression to the aging woman more naturalistically portrayed in her iconic linoleum cut titled Sharecropper. She carved the original linoleum block in 1952, but the print in the show dates from 1970. Rendered in half-profile and viewed from below her eye level, the woman wears a broad-brimmed hat whose woven straw fibers are treated in detail. The hat and her leathery-looking skin suggests that she is accustomed to laboring outdoors under a hot sun, while the safety pin holding her dark blouse closed at her neck hints at how poorly she is paid.
The latter print and several others in the show reveal Catlett's aptitude for naturalistic detail, enabling her -- when she chooses -- to vividly evoke character and personality in her subjects. Other striking examples include Cartas, a portrait of a solitary woman at a table strewn with letters and envelopes, dating from 1986, and Two Generations, a dual portrait of a young boy and an elderly woman from 1979.
The facial features of the women in these two prints -- especially their dark, narrowed eyes -- are similar enough that they could be blood relatives of different generations.
Over the years Catlett has alternated between naturalistic portraiture and more stylized depictions of her human subjects. The contrast between the two approaches is highlighted by this show's inclusion of works such as the two previously discussed, as well as earlier ones such as Domestic Worker and A Second Generation, a color lithograph from 1992. The latter print places the highly stylized profile heads of a young man and woman in a fiery red- and orange-outlined square above a row of much smaller silhouetted figures in blue, who march across the bottom of the composition with their fists upraised in the black-power salute.
Thematically, Catlett's work reminds its viewers again and again that black Americans remain politically disempowered despite their aspirations and their rich historical and cultural heritage.
■ "Solitude and Solidarity: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett" is on view through April 19 at the Delta Arts Center, 2611 New Walkertown Road. Catlett will participate in a public conversation with author Maya Angelou at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the center. Admission is $75 a person, $125 a couple. For more information, call 336-722-2625.
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