Her Journey Goes On

They are arranged as if congregated in an airy grove, or maybe in the shade at a garden party reunion--conversing, or more aptly, testifying about what they’ve seen, where they’ve been, where they want to go.

Women with strong backs, majestic hips thrust forward, mahogany arms defiantly piercing the air. Men with furrowed brows and strong jaws fashioned from black onyx or bronze. They watch from glass-enclosed cases or perch on pedestals surveying the expanse with seen-it-all eyes.

These are artist Elizabeth Catlett’s stalwart figures, taken from the rich realm of imagination and the day-to-day ritual of real life. Her sculptures--notes from 50 years in the field addressing race and racism, femininity and feminism--speak volumes of a people’s path and persistence.

In its only West Coast stop, “Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A 50 Year Retrospective,” at the California African-American Museum, allows for a rare look at Catlett’s sculpture (she is also a printmaker and painter). Curated by Lucinda H. Gedeon, director of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y.--where the exhibition originated--the show features 52 works in bronze, marble, stone, terra cotta and wood and has been touring since last year, with stops in Houston and Baltimore. After L.A., its final stop will be Spelman College’s Museum of Fine Arts in Atlanta.

Gathering these pieces to tell their larger, collective story was more difficult than Catlett had imagined. “We began to try to borrow sculpture. Some people didn’t want to lend it for two years. But enough did,” she explains in a phone conversation from her TriBeCa studio, there on the second leg of her whirlwind tour of the States, a journey that often works out to be a three-times-a-year event.

Catlett speaks sparingly, with the voice of a seasoned storyteller, in rich, rounded tones as easily paced and contoured as the curves and slopes in her work. She and her husband, artist Francisco Mora, have been hopping about the last few weeks: collecting honorary degrees like charms on an heirloom bracelet (one each from the Maryland Institute College of Art and one for her from Pratt University); giving talks about their work; meeting with dealers; hammering out the details on upcoming installations and commissions. Though she enjoys the sparks that fly from city friction, Catlett says she’s ready to go back home--Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she’s lived since 1946.

It was winning a Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship that first led her there. It was her marriage to Mora that convinced her to stay--that and being able to work without being muted or hamstrung, with the space and time to really stretch out, imagine.

But the imprint of the American South and the course of the African American has always remained prominently situated in her mind and, consequently, boldly articulated in her work. Pieces like “Black Unity” from 1968--a burnished mahogany fist on one side, two African mask-like visages revealed on the other--and “Homage to My Young Black Sisters,” from the same year--a red cedar impressionistic turn on a forward-striding sister, fist raised--became not only symbols of a movement, but also Catlett’s own signed missive that her head and heart were rooted deeply in the struggle.

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Born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., Catlett never knew her father, who died before she was born. She was raised by her seamstress mother, Mary, who supported Elizabeth and her two older siblings, John and Cera, by taking an office job at a local public school.

By age 6, Elizabeth began to exhibit an interest in art, bolstered by her mother, who kept her in supplies. After graduating from Dunbar High School with an art emphasis, she applied to Howard University’s art program. But not before applying to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, whose admissions board was impressed with her skills but declined admission, observing, “Too bad she’s colored.”

It was one of many indignities Catlett faced on her way toward an fine-arts education in this country. Graduating from Howard cum laude in 1936, she moved to State University of Iowa for her master’s in fine arts, which granted entree to the program but not its dorms. It was at Iowa that she studied with painter Grant Wood and took her first course in sculpting--and found a sense of ease and purpose working with her hands. After receiving her MFA, Catlett began the itinerant teacher’s life--from summer teaching at Prairie View College in Texas to chairing the art department at New Orleans’ prestigious Dillard University.

The ‘40s also found Catlett in New York, busy not just exhibiting and teaching, but also becoming more politically involved--working as a promotion director and fund-raiser and teaching at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, as well as chairing a fund drive for Russian war relief. Amid it all, she found time to apply for the Rosenwald. “That was the only fellowship black people in the arts could get. And I had written proposals for several people who had gotten the grant, and so,” she adds with a wry laugh, “I thought I would write one for me!”

She was to produce a series of prints, paintings and sculpture of black women, but Catlett was so overwhelmed with her day job’s fund-raising duties that she had little time to work on the project. “[Writer] Arna Bontemps told me that if I wanted a renewal [of the fellowship] I should get out of New York City, so I went to Mexico. I was interested in the public art--the murals and printmaking.”

There, she found herself at the center of a community of activists and artists and could count David Alfaro Siquerios, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera among her friends. She immediately settled in with a vibrant printmaking collective, Taller de Grafica Popular, where she made the acquaintance of Pablo O’Higgins, Leopold Mendez and Mora--whose politics and passion would provide her with yet another prism through which to view the world and her work.

“I didn’t have any great attachment [to the U.S.]. Since I grew up in Washington, I wasn’t very patriotic. I liked Mexico, the people. I met my husband when I went to the Taller; I was looking at prints, and I got a little dizzy on account of the altitude, and we all went out to a restaurant nearby and we were sitting in a booth and I was sitting in front of Poncho Mora--Francisco Mora--’Poncho’ is his nickname. They said, you don’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t speak English; why don’t you teach him English and he’ll teach you Spanish? And so he came around to learn English, and then he came around and brought his guitar . . . and sang some songs. That’s how we met. Very romantic. He still hasn’t learned English well.”

But as much as she was enchanted by the new sights, the new language, what was building in the States around race and equity still felt like a hot breath against her neck. Being so far away, says Catlett, “I felt guilty more than anything.” But she kept abreast of the news at the lunch counters, at the marches, in the churches, through newspapers, television, letters from family and friends. Her art began to reflect not just the prominent figures but also the force and emotion that fueled and guided the civil rights movement.

“I wanted to take away the fear of black people,” she says. “I think a lot of it exists. Especially of black men. But I also wanted to show black women in another light. A lot of people think of us as servants and people with loose morals. I wanted to show the strength and beauty of black women. And the danger to black men.”

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Written across the walls of the California African-American Museum’s main gallery, Catlett’s words resonate: “I have always wanted my art to service my people--to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”

Appropriately, American, African and pre-Columbian influences have wound themselves into her work, sometimes singularly, sometimes combined--becoming like a scrapbook of her physical and intellectual pursuits and travels.

Standing in front of Catlett’s 1964 piece “Mujer,” a study in mahogany, sweeping skirts and the suggestion of hip, Jamesina Henderson, the museum’s executive director, is moved by the poetic frankness of Catlett’s expression. “I look at her women, their little tummies, their strong, strong thighs; they are sensuous in their authenticity. This,” says Henderson, “is something that’s glorifying all that is not silicone.”

All that is real--both beautiful and difficult.

So much of Catlett’s work, gathered together, ancestor to ancestor, is much like the symbolic mother-and-child embrace that re-enunciates itself--one who nurtures and one in need. Her work begs us to find lessons in the ephemeral, in the seemingly mundane: a daily task (“Woman Fixing Her Hair,” 1993); a frequent predicament (“Target,” 1970); an ambient feeling (“Tired,” 1946).

It’s the resonance of resourcefulness, the heirloom of survival that people want to talk about. Across the country, the crowds, the attention, the recognition (more than 1,000 attended the L.A. opening) heartens Catlett--not for the sake of vanity, but, she says, “there are a lot of things that I know that I can teach people. Most of the work is in somebody’s home, and no one can see it. That’s what’s nice about having an exhibition. It makes me very happy, because I feel that that is one of my aims--to do art that has some relation to African American people. Seeing all those people sends a message that maybe I’m doing a little bit of what I wanted to do. Which is to bring African American people into museums. And I really believe that if it is something that they relate to, they will come.”

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“Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture,” California African-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Aug. 15. Free. (213) 744-7432.