"Elizabeth Catlett"(April 15,1915-April 2,2012)

Was an American Mexican sculptor and printmaking.Elizabeth is best known for the

black,expressionistic sculptures and prints she produced during the 1960s and 1970s,which are seen as politically charged.Elizabeth was born in Washington,D.C.,the youngest of three children.Both of her parents were teachers.She attended the Lucretia Elementary School,Dunbar High School,Then Howard University where she studied design,printmaking and drawing.In an interview in December  1981 in Artist and influence magazine,she stated that she changed her major to painting because of the influence of James A.Porter,because there was no sculpture division at Howard at the time.Elizabeth received her BS cum laude from Howard in 1935.She then worked as a high school teacher in North Carolina but left after two years, frustrated by the low teaching salaries for black people.While living and working in Harlem,New York,she was briefly married to Charles White.In 1947,she married Mexican artist Francisco Mora,and made Mexico her permanent home,later becoming a Mexican citizen.They have have three sons,including film director Juan Mora.Her granddaughter,Naima Mora,was the Cycle 4 winner of the America's Next Top Model television show.Elizabeth's sculpture,Naima,is of Naima as child.After retiring in 1975,Elizabeth continued to be active in the Cuernavaca,Mexico art community.In 1940 she became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art History.While there,Elizabeth was influenced by American painter who urged students to work with the subjects they knew best.For Elizabeth,this meant black people,and especially black women,and it was at this point that her work began to focus on African Americans.Her piece Mother and Child,done in limestone in 1939 for her thesis,won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940.She studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941, lithography at the Art Students League of New York in 1942-1943,and with sculptor Ossip Zadkine  in New York in 1943.Elizabeth became the promotion director' for the George Washington Carver School in Harlem located at  57 W.125th St. Roy DeCarava was one of the students.Some of the teachers included Ernest Crichlow,Norman Lewis,and Charles White.In 1946,she received a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico where she studied wood carving with Jose L.Ruiz and ceramic sculpture  with Francisco Zuniga at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda,Mexico.Elizabeth later moved to Mexico,married,and became a Mexican citizen.In Mexico she worked with the People Graphic Arts Workshop,a group of printmakers organized in1937 by Leopold Mendez,Raul Anguiano,Luis Arenal,and Pablo O'Higgins and dedicated to using their art to promote social changes.There she and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes.They "did posters,leaflets,collective booklets,illustrations for texbooks,posters and illustrations for the constructions of schools,against illiteracy IN Mexico.She became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,School of Fine arts,San Carlos,in Mexico,City,in 1958,and taught there until retiring in 1975.Elizabeth was active in the art community of Cuernavaca,Morelos.In 1980 she donated a collection of her personal papers,exhibition catalogs,and other documentary materials to the Archives of American Art in the Smithsonian Institution.Elizabeth died in Cuernavaca.