Art for the service of her people
Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915 and died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 2012, and in the 96 years she was alive she produced a body of work at once so formally varied and so committed to illustrating the lives of African-American women and men that the United States government declared her an “undesirable alien”, barring her from re-entering the country of her birth. “I have always wanted my art to service my people,” she once told a former student obituary, “to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential”.
