Elizabeth Catlett: American-Mexican sculptor

 I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful ».

Born April 15, 1915, Elizabeth Catlett is a famous African-American Mexican artist. Passionate about art, she continued her studies and became the first student to obtain a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the School of Art and History of Art at the University of Iowa. In her art, she merges the basic elements of African traditions with those of western Mexico and African Americans. She specializes in topics related to her community, especially black women. It evokes the heroic strength and endurance of African American and Mexican women workers in the fields of sculpture, painting and engraving. She received the first sculpture award at the American Negro Exhibition in Chicago in 1940 with her painting “Mother and Child”
In 1941, she worked on ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, and lithographs at the Art Students League in New York from 1942 to 1943. From the mid-1950s in Mexico she Carries wooden sculptures. But also sculptures made of stone, bronze or clay. In her work, she mixes the female forms, curves, whorls, color or luster of her chosen medium.

Her work has been exhibited all over the world and is found in many museums, including the National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Museum American in Washington, DC.
On April 2, 2012, she died in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

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