Dalila Scruggs, the Augusta Savage Curator of African American art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Catherine Morris, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, had been talking for nearly a year about trying to put together a show featuring the work of the activist-artist Elizabeth Catlett. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted cultural organizations to act and motivated them to bring this idea to fruition.
At the time, several other institutions were also reconsidering Catlett’s work, including Mary Lee Corlett, a print expert at the National Gallery, who was planning an exhibition of Catlett’s prints. The three curators worked together to organize Catlett’s prints, analyze the feminist perspectives she used in sculpture and paintings, and look at how she addressed social justice and cultural themes throughout her body of work.
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Their resulting comprehensive retrospective, “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” featuring approximately 150 pieces of Catlett’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings, debuted at the Brooklyn Museum from Sept. 13, 2024–Jan. 19, 2025, and attracted thousands of visitors. The exhibition moves to D.C. this week.
“One of the things Delilah, Mary Lee, and I knew very early on was that we were building on important work done on Catlett during her lifetime and after, including exhibitions (such as) one by Lowery Stokes Sims,” said Morris. “But we hadn’t seen an attempt to bring all of the parts of Catlett together into one monographic show — her identity as a Black American woman, her identity as a Mexican woman, her sculpture, and her printmaking. Often other exhibitions — and understandably so; we’re talking about 70 years of production — have focused on one component or another. We felt like in 2025, it was time to try [to] show how this holistic picture of Catlett is, in fact, truly representative of the richness and brilliance of the artist.
“She was all those things at once. And she was also a mother, and she was also an activist. All of those things play a part in all of her creative work.”
“Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” is an extensive exhibition of Catlett’s work that shows how the apparently disparate parts of Catlett’s life came together. Scruggs, who edited the catalog for the exhibition, explained that Catlett’s art and activism were an essential part of the world she lived in.
The 20-century’s Mexican muralist movement and Black American leftist-oriented activism taking place in cities like D.C., Chicago, and New York profoundly influenced Catlett.
“Ultimately, she became a Mexican artist in the sense that she became a Mexican citizen and was a fully fledged member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular or the People’s Graphic Workshop,” said Scruggs. “They operated with the principles of making work in the interest of the Mexican people. The idea was that they were supporting labor unions, students, rural workers, and urban workers, and making work to speak to those people, but also to support protests, strikes, and other things like that — making practical works of art like posters, as well as print portfolios.”
During the Cold War years, when left-leaning artists felt the United States was becoming too restrictive, many traveled to Mexico. Catlett became someone they could ground themselves with and begin to understand the politically infused art of Mexican modernism, Scruggs said.
The National Gallery showing of Catlett’s work finally brings her artistic essence back to Washington, D.C., her hometown, added Lynn Matheny, the National Gallery’s deputy head and associate curator of interpretation. “For us in Washington, it’s an exciting opportunity to take on an artist of international stature and national importance, but who’s also local,” Matheny said. “Catlett went to Dunbar High School and then her initial training in art was at Howard University, and she had a solo exhibition early at the Barnett-Aden Gallery, so this [exhibition] is a bit of a homecoming for her, in that sense.”
“Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” is set to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., on Mar. 9 and will be on view there until July 6, 2025, before traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago from Aug. 30, 2025, through Jan. 4, 2026.