Elizabeth CatlettTHE DOOR OF JUSTICE Signed Lithograph, Black Lawyers Civil Rights Social Justice2000
2000
About the Item
- Creator:Elizabeth Catlett (1915 - 2012, American)
- Creation Year:2000
- Dimensions:Height: 24.25 in (61.6 cm)Width: 27.5 in (69.85 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Mint condition, unframed, pencil signed, inscribed P.P.(Printers Proof)aside from edition of 100, actual print number may vary from photo, printers chop on lower corner, print documentation/COA provided, from the master printers private collection.
- Gallery Location:Union City, NJ
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU832311552032
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.
Find a range of authentic Elizabeth Catlett art today on 1stDibs.
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: Union City, NJ
- Return PolicyA return for this item may be initiated within 3 days of delivery.
- RABBI TEACHING Signed Lithograph, Rabbi and Young Boy, Jewish Art, JudaismLocated in Union City, NJRABBI TEACHING is an original hand drawn, limited edition lithograph printed in black ink on archival Arches printmaking paper 100% acid free from a hand drawn lithography stone usin...Category
1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- GERTRUDE Hand Drawn Lithograph, Young Black Girl Portrait, SunflowerBy Samella LewisLocated in Union City, NJGERTRUDE by the African American woman artist Samella Lewis, is an original hand drawn lithograph printed using hand lithography techniqu...Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- QUIET AFTERNOON Signed Lithograph, Seated Woman, Bouquet of Flowers, Carafe VaseLocated in Union City, NJQUIET AFTERNOON is an original hand drawn lithograph by the American woman artist Susan Sahall, printed in the early 1980's, using hand lithography techniques on archival Arches printmaking paper, 100% acid free. QUIET AFTERNOON portrays a very sensitive female portrait drawing of a seated young woman wearing a black pleated bell sleeve dress posed holding her hands clasped near her cheek, elbows resting on a table; a bouquet of pastel color flowers fill a carafe vase in front of her. She appears to be in quiet thought...Category
1980s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph, Mixed Media
- SABBATH ANGELS Signed Lithograph, Watercolor Portrait, Angels, CandlesticksBy Chaim GrossLocated in Union City, NJSABBATH ANGELS is an original hand drawn lithograph(not a photo reproduction or digital print) by the American artist/sculptor Chaim Gross, presenting an impressive sculptural drawing of two majestic female angels welcoming the sabbath as two lit candlesticks glow beneath the wings of the yellow angel. SABBATH ANGELS was hand proofed and printed from lithographic plates on archival Arches paper, 100% acid free. SABBATH ANGELS is a contemporary style angel portrait measuring 14 x 20.5 inches, image size is 9.25 x 15 inches, a very fine impression pulled from hand drawn lithography plates. Printed in transparent watercolor shades of light blue, light brown red, yellow and graphite black for the pencil drawing using the age-old hand printing methods first used in fine art lithography printmaking. Chaim Gross,(1904 - 1991) was a sculptor, artist, and teacher, known for his wood carvings, sculptures of moving human figures, religious imagery, acrobats, mothers and children. Chaim was born on March 17, 1904 to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia. During World War I, Russian forces invaded Austria-Hungary; amidst the turmoil, the Grosses fled Kolomyia. They returned when Austria retook the town in 1915, refugees of the war. When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest, where Gross attended the city's art academy and studied with painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna shortly before emigrating to New York City in 1921. In the U.S., Gross's studies continued at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied sculpture with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League, with sculptor Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Gross exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art). In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. Also in 1932, Gross married Renee Nechin (1909-2005), and they had two children, Yehuda and Mimi (Mimi Gross is a New York-based artist, and was married to the artist Red Grooms from 1963-1976). In 1933, Gross joined the government's PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration). Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures for schools and public colleges, and created works for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the 1937 Exposition universelle in Paris. Chaim Gross, Sculptor by Josef Vincent Lombardo, the first major book on Gross, came out in 1949 and included a catalogue raisonne of his sculpture. In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1963, Gross and his family moved from their longtime residence at 30 W. 105th Street to Greenwich Village, following the purchase of a four-story historic townhouse at 526 LaGuardia Place, which is now the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation. In 1974, the Smithsonian American Art Museum held the exhibition, Chaim Gross: Sculpture and Drawings, and in 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African...Category
1980s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- TENOR SERMON Signed Lithograph, Abstract Portrait Jazz Music Drum Sax TromboneBy Romare BeardenLocated in Union City, NJTENOR SERMON is a limited edition color lithograph by the renowned African American artist Romare Bearden(September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988), printed on ...Category
1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- INTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN(Uptown At Savoy) Signed Lithograph, Blues SingerBy Romare BeardenLocated in Union City, NJINTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN(Uptown At Savoy) is a limited edition color lithograph by the renowned African American artist Romare Bearden, printed on archival printmaking paper, 100% acid free, in an edition size of 175. INTRODUCTION FOR A BLUES QUEEN 1979 from Romare Bearden's colorful JAZZ series of musical imagery, is an abstract portrait that captures the LIVE energy created by the female blues singer...Category
1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Chez Panisse Birthday Celebration: Signed Limited Ed. Goines Graphic Art PosterBy David Lance GoinesLocated in Alamo, CAThis original framed graphic art lithographic poster entitled "Chez Panisse Cafe & Restaurant Seventeenth Birthday" was created by David Lance Goines in 1...Category
Late 20th Century Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Chez Panisse Restaurant Birthday Celebration: Original Goines Graphic Art PosterBy David Lance GoinesLocated in Alamo, CAThis original framed graphic art lithographic poster entitled "Chez Panisse Cafe & Restaurant Sixteenth Birthday" was created by David Lance Goines in 198...Category
Late 20th Century Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Chez Panisse 12th Birthday Celebration: Limited Ed. Goines Graphic Art PosterBy David Lance GoinesLocated in Alamo, CAThis original graphic art lithographic poster entitled "Twelve, Chez Panisse Twelfth Birthday" was created by David Lance Goines in 1983 in his Berkeley s...Category
Late 20th Century Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Daumier Satirical Lithograph Depicting French Men Tasting and Critiquing WineBy Honoré DaumierLocated in Alamo, CADaumier was a master of French satire and caricatures. In this lithograph entitled "TYPES PARISIENS NO. 1, Eh bien malin! comment le trouvez vous celui-là! - Oui, oui, mais enfin - O...Category
1840s Other Art Style Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Chez Panisse Restaurant Birthday Celebration: Original Goines Graphic Art PosterBy David Lance GoinesLocated in Alamo, CAThis original graphic art lithographic poster entitled "Chez Panisse Restaurant and Cafe" was created by David Lance Goines in 1989 in his Berkeley studio...Category
Late 20th Century Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph
- Visit our Toy Department original vintage chromolithograph posterLocated in Spokane, WAOriginal vintage poster: TOY DEPARTMENT. Chromolithographed illustration of a mother and four young children surrounded by a ball, blocks, and dolls, and with two young girls reading a book. No publishing information, but with a Shirley Temple doll...Category
1920s Art Nouveau Interior Prints
MaterialsLithograph