The survey of the American Mexican sculptor and printmaker will show how activism and art went hand in hand
By Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper
Photo, The Art Newspaper
In the spring of 1970, Elizabeth Catlett, the American Mexican artist and activist, was forced to deliver her address to the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art (Confaba) at Northwestern University in Illinois by phone after the US embassy in Mexico had labelled her “a threat to the wellbeing of the United States”, as she put it, and refused her visa application. “To the degree and in the proportion that the United States constitute a threat to Black people, to that degree and more, do I hope I have earned that honour,” she told her listeners at Confaba. “For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies.”
Catlett’s self-defining quotation serves as the title for a new survey of the artist, who died in 2012. The most comprehensive ever organised in the US, it opens this month at the Brooklyn Museum and will subsequently travel to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in the artist’s native Washington, DC, and to the Art Institute of Chicago.
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