b. 1915
Born in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth Catlett studied art under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa, then taught at Hampton University in Virginia. She married artist Charles White in 1941. They lived in New
York, where they mingled with other intellectuals and artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Langston Hughes.
In 1946 Catlett received a Rosenwald Fellowship, and she and White visited Mexico, where they studied painting, sculpture, and lithography and worked with Taller de Grafica Popular, a socially active artists’ collective. The following year they divorced, but Catlett remained in Mexico City, working with some of the most distinguished printmakers of the city. In 1962, she married painter-engraver Francisco Mora and made Mexico her home.
Today, Catlett continues to express a profound concern for the plight of women and the poor through her paintings and sculptures in marble, wood, and terra-cotta.