Elizabeth Catlett
'Survivor' — Elizabeth Catlett
1983

Name: 'Survivor' — Elizabeth Catlett
Brand: Elizabeth Catlett
Price: 5440 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Elizabeth Catlett, 'Survivor', linocut, 1983, edition 1000. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered '914/1000' in pencil. A fine impression, on heavy, cream wove paper, with full margins ( 1/2 to 1 1/4 inches), in excellent condition. Image size: 9 3/8 x 7 7/16 inches; sheet size 11 1/8 x 10 inches. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Impressions of this print are in the permanent collections of the following institutions: Chazen Museum of Art (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Hampton University Museum, Lasalle University Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miami-Dade Public Library, National Gallery of Art, Scripps College (CA), Toledo Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, University of Iowa Museum of Art. ABOUT THIS WORK "Elizabeth Catlett's prints cry out in protest, proclaim solidarity, demand justice and celebrate the determination, staunch resistance, and, at times against all odds, sheer survival of ordinary people. For more than sixty years, first in the United States and then Mexico, Catlett has produced politically charged and aesthetically compelling graphic images of what matters to her the most - the lives of everyday people, the heroines, and heroes of African American and Latin liberation movements. Printmaking for Catlett is a consciously political practice. At the same time, however, her prints - some intricately detailed and others elegantly spare - manifest her understanding that the power of an image resides in the artist's command of form, sensitivity to materials, and technical proficiency. As an artist for whom community is fundamentally important, Catlett is steadfastly convinced that her art must speak clearly to her audience, and the clarity and eloquence of the visual language she employs derive from her ongoing engagement with both artists and non-artists. Indeed, it is people that matter most to her. Catlett's 'Survivor' of 1983 depicts a rural Southern U.S. laborer, careworn and strong. Derived directly from Dorothea Lange's 'Ex-slave with a Long Memory', a photograph Lange made in Alabama in 1937-38 while documenting rural Southern life in the United States for the Farm Security Administration (the woman in Lange's photograph faces left, while Catlett's linocut image, drawn following Lange and reversed in the printing process, faces right), 'Survivor' recalls the TGP's use of well-known photographic images as sources. Yet, while the woman in Lange's photograph is seen against the background of the field in which she toils, Catlett's minimally rendered background only suggests topography in its abstract linear pattern. Outlined in white, the woman becomes the unmistakable focus of the image. As in her earlier linocuts, Catlett utilized various nicks, gouges, and incised lines to delineate her subject's physical presence, but in contrast to her work at the TGP, this image is somewhat more spare, reminiscent of Kollwitz's later woodcuts." – Melanie Anne Herzog, Art Institute of Chicago

Creator:

Elizabeth Catlett (1915 - 2012, American)

Creation Year:

1983

Dimensions:

Height: 9.38 in (23.83 cm)Width: 7.44 in (18.9 cm)

Medium:

Linocut

Movement & Style:

American Modern

Period:

1980-1989

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Myrtle Beach, SC

Reference Number:

Seller: 1039501stDibs: LU532311166592

View Invoice

Shop All Elizabeth Catlett

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.