December 19, 2025 • 43 mins
Yves shares the incredible story of artist, sculptor and activist Elizabeth Catlett.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to stuff I've never told you production of iHeartRadio.
And it is time for another edition of Female First,
the last of twenty twenty five, which means that we
are once again thrilled to be joined by the brilliant,
(00:27):
the brainy Eves.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome ees, I like Brany, Thank you Brandy. That's fun.
Yeah right, I'm mixing up. It's very before. I don't
know why I was just giving like WB cartoons. I
don't know that is what I just thought. Yes, that
should have scared me.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
It should. I think it was we are all of
our cartoons were a little bit eccentric, like you realize that.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, we my brothers for some reason, probably because I
was a pushover, they got to choose what cartoons we
watched in the morning, and they would choose like Pinky
in the Brain, all these cartoons that just scared me,
and I'd go to school like a little unseppled.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Is it because a rat was trying to take over
the world?
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Maybe I think it was more just vibes.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I don't think it had a feeling to it, and
the animation style was kind of just started out.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It was dark, yeah, writ and stimpy Pinky and the Rain.
I think this is where we are, like why adults
swim in those cartoons and then things like Bob's Burgers
all that are so like a part of our lives
and so popular in our in our generation because of
stuff like that because it was cartoon but with adult
(01:45):
meaning that we did not understand.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, where is this longitudinal study on how those impacted
our psychology? Though?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Like?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
What is what? What was the effect of those?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Deep dive?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
He should?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I would love I bet someone has looked into it,
because there was a very particular aesthetic, and even the
educational ones like do you do you all remember hysteria?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
It was like a hysteros.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I don't remember that one. I might be getting the
name wrong, but it was history. It was a history show, okay,
and it was kind of like animaniacs. I didn't like
that one either. I didn't like it either.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
It sounds like that sounds like a.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Deep cut ny I didn't sounds vaguely familiar, but I
can't quite remember it. That's gonna be something that we
have to look down the road.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I actually frequently end up talking about old cartoons with
random people.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Uh, well, Eves, how have you been What have you
been up to?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I've been good for the most part. I've been pretty good.
It's hard not to be good when you're in such
lovely surrounds. I am in Cape Town now because I
live here now, so I get to see I get
to see these beautiful mountains every day and the day
a long. Hey, I think you know, that's one thing
that's really helping me out, because I think I do
have a tendency to get some seasonal depression, and I'm
(03:08):
living that what do they call it chasing the sun?
It has another name. I feel like I'm living that
life where I get to pretend I'm like those rich
people who like go from like where it's cold, and
they're like, I don't want to be here because it's
cold warm and it's snowburts, and then it's about to
be old there and they go to the other place
where it's warm. So uh, I faked my you know,
(03:30):
fake it till you make it. I left the gold
of where I was and came here to the warmth. Actually,
I was in India right before this, and that was
a great time as well. Loved it there, can't wait
to go back. But but here, yeah, long to be
experiencing the exact opposite of what my body usually experienced.
Is at this time, which is the longest day of
(03:52):
the year, and it being very warm right now. I
think it's very good for my for my psyche, for
my general health, for my mental health, for all of it.
So it's definitely helping me out here. So I'm grateful
for it. I love that.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And I will tell you, just like in the zoom call,
you are glowing from the sunlight behind you, so you
look that as well, so it's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Thank you. I have to say, I think my skin
took a hit while I was in New Delhi, so
I think I've been recovering since I got here. Be
real about that. Like I got to the city and
I'm I like cities a lot, but like New Delhi
is the citiest of all the cities, the city city
high city with the capital t top tier, and I
(04:40):
think like that definitely took a toll on my scan.
So I've recovered in this a few weeks that I've
been here so far, So thank you for noticing.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
That descriptor of the city was really on point.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I mean it.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I was like, yeah, okay, I will say here in
Georgia as is gloomy and dry for the first time
at the same time humid. My face is not loving
it either. I'm like, I'm filling that. But maybe it's
just this again, the seasonal thing with all the depression
is just adding to my face.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, y'all had a cold snap there recently.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yes, we're slowly coming out of it.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yes, sorry, today it is rainy and very dark. I
actually like the rain, but I hate when I have
to work during I like to like watch it out
my window.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
She likes to be a part of the Emo moment staring.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
At in the rain. You know, I was an EMO kid.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I know.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I was like, what video was that with Hillary Duff?
Was that? Come clean? Were she's staring out at the
window with the rain drops on it?
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You have.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
The poster child of emo. Okay, clearly you see what
were my mind go?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Where?
Speaker 3 (05:53):
What kind of kid I was? I didn't have a face.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Okay, let's just say even when it's dark, is still
not dark? Going than that?
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I love that for you.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
But also, Hillary Duff just came out with a new
album not too long ago.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
You are she could be emo in that. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I think she said it was for her queer fans
are gay fans. She was like, this is for my
gay friends, This is for y'all.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Okay, okay, everybody get one. I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I'm sure there's gay emo people who would also love
a gay emo band.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Oh sure, yeah, you know. I'm not familiar with her work,
but I know people of all kinds enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
So oh this is gone left.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I don't know how how we got from old cartoons
to Hillary Duff, but it's a natural progression, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, I am very excited to talk about who you
brought today, Eves. I was looking at some I always
love when I get to look at art when we're
doing these, and I was just really enjoying looking at
the art.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
So who are we talking about today? Today? We're talking
about Elizabeth Catlett, and I have to say, I am
so excited to talk about her. I'm truly excited. I
am biased, and I love when we get to talk
about people and artistic mediums here in general, too, So
there is that, but I just love her story. It
is one of lots of reinvention and her having going
(07:32):
into a lot of different directions, and I really appreciate
that about her story. But I also love being able
to look at her art work because it is really marvelous.
So anybody who gets a chance to see anything in
person or you know, check out stuff peruse Elizabeth Catlet's
work online, please do so. But her first is that
(07:54):
she was the first woman to get an mfan sculpture
from the University of Iowa, and she was the first
woman sculpture professor at the National School of Fine Arts
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. So she had
a couple of first and she had a very long
(08:16):
and illustrious career which I'm looking forward to talking about.
So Elizabeth was born on April fifteen, nineteen fifteen, in Washington,
d c. Her grandparents were enslaved, and as a child,
(08:39):
she heard stories of her great great grandmother, who had
been pregnant when she was kidnapped from Madagascar and enslaved
in the United States. She had also heard about her
grandmother's enslavement and how her grandparents learned to read and write. Unfortunately,
her father died some months before she was born. He
(09:01):
had been a math professor at Tuskegee and he taught
in the public school system in DC. He also had
artistic side, so he was a musician and a wood carver.
Her mother, on the other hand, was a truant officer.
She also helped support the family that way, and Elizabeth
had two older siblings, so it was very early on.
(09:24):
Clearly she already had in her parents' role models in
people who cared about education, and they cared about the
arts as well, and Elizabeth knew early on that she
wanted to be an artist. Now, of course, at the time,
this was the early nineteen hundreds, there weren't a lot
of black women who were practicing artists, but this was
still an aim of hers. She ended up graduating from
(09:47):
Dunbar High School in nineteen thirty one, and she applied
to art schools as she was graduating from high school,
and she did end up getting into the Carnegie Institute
of Technology which is now Carnegie Mellon. But she was black,
which she couldn't help. But she was black, and they
were like, that's not going to fly with us. You're
not getting in, So it doesn't matter how well you
(10:07):
did at your Infrances exams. You're not coming in to
our school. She went to Howard University instead. Great school,
so it's like great, she went to Howard University instead,
screw you other people. She studied design, printmaking, drawing, painting,
art history, all of the art things when she was
(10:29):
at Howard, and you can see that there was a
lot of influence for her at Howard and going on
to the rest of her artistic and professional life. James
Porter was one of her teachers, and she later said
that he helped her develop the discipline necessary to be
an artist, which is a lot of the battle. So
(10:49):
clearly that had an impact on her. So through her
education at Howard, she was also surrounded by the artistic
thought that came along with the Harlem Renaissance, surrounded by
a lot of the people who were thinking about concepts
that were related to race. So she had the best
of both worlds, seemingly. So she was surrounded by all
(11:11):
of this critical thought, all of this artistic thought, and
then she had somebody who was helping her with her discipline.
So I could just imagine that there was so much
that was being fomented, so much that was welling up
in her because she was getting the skill and the
aptitude of things, and she was also able to work
through all these different ideas and a lot of them
(11:33):
were competing ideas, not everybody agreed with each other. So
there was Alan Locke who was a philosophy professor at
Howard and he was also an important figure in the
Harlem Renaissance, and he was really about this whole racialism
and art side of things, versus her teacher, James Porter.
Elizabeth's teacher, James Porter, was not so much in that wheelhouse.
(11:55):
He wasn't so much about racializing so much in his art.
So at the same time, Elizabeth herself was drawn to
African art and black subjects. But she did say that
wasn't so much about doctor Alan Locke's viewpoints, and it
was more about the fact that there were other artists
(12:15):
that were also focusing on black subjects. And that makes
a lot of sense too, because it's like you're surrounded
by this. This is a lot of what you're seeing.
So she was clearly influenced by that. But yeah, so
she continued school. In nineteen thirty five, she got her
bachelors and she was Kumbloudie and then after school she
(12:37):
moved to Durham, North Carolina, and in Durham, she basically
jumped right into education, following in her parents' footsteps. She
taught art in the public schools, but you know, as
is wont to happen, she wasn't so focused on her
own art and she went to grad school at the
(12:58):
State University of Iowa later the Universe of Iowa in
Iowa City. She's like, it's taught for me to get
back to my own art. She was only one of
just two black students in the art department there. And
I think if y'all once y'all heard University of Iowa,
y'all were probably like, yes, she's probably not that many
other black students in the art department there. It's also
(13:20):
the early nineteen hundreds, Okay, makes sense. But she it
was actually fortuitous because she made a lifelong friend there.
She had to live in off campus housing because black
students couldn't stay in the dorms. The other the student,
the other black student who was also her roommate, was
Margaret Walker, and she remained her friend and colleague for
(13:43):
the rest of her life. So while she was at
the University of Iowa, she was studying drawing and painting.
And she had this other teacher, Grant Wood, who also
left a big mark on her. He was a painter.
So Elizabeth became interested in sculpture, but her teacher, Grant
(14:03):
would He was like, you, you should make what you
know and that'll be the best subject of your art.
So this is how he encouraged her to make art.
And you'll see this show up in her commentary about
her work and in some of the work she did.
(14:24):
As we'll talk about going forward. She got the first
Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture that was awarded
at the University of Ioue. At this point, it's her
first and then the main piece she had to have
an exhibition at the end of her time in the school.
In her nineteen forty exhibition was a limestone sculpture called
(14:44):
Negro Mother and Child. And this is what she said
in her thesis statement. She said, to create a composition
of two figures, one smaller than the other, so interlaced
as to be expressive of maternity, and so compact as
to be suitable to stone seemed a desirable problem. The
implications of motherhood, especially Negro motherhood, are quite important to
(15:05):
me as I am a Negro as well as a woman.
That's the end of the quote. So she's already getting
into kind of a The best subject of your art
is what you know about, and it's also a lot
of what she was surrounded surrounded by in her actual
lived experience, and also a lot of the other art
that she was saying what it was representing. So that sculpture,
(15:29):
she actually sent off a picture to it because this
was part of what she needed to be able to graduate,
basically to be in a national exposition, And she sent
off a picture to it and got accepted into the
American Negro Exposition in Chicago that summer, and she actually
got the first place award in sculpture there, so that
was pretty cool. And in the fall of nineteen forty
(15:52):
she started teaching at Diller University in New Orleans. She
taught drawing, painting, printmaking, art history, and I'm just like
you weren't really teaching all the things like you have
to be very adept at something to be able to
share it with people. And she did all of those
things in her practice and in her and in studying
(16:13):
and in her she would go on to do in
her practice and then she was also sharing all of
those with everyone, which is really cool to see, and
there are other things we'll talk about it she shared
with people. So this story, I love this story in
her biography. So she wanted her students to see a
Picasso retrospective at the Del Gatto Museum, which is now
the New Orleans Museum of Art, but it was in
(16:34):
a park where black folks couldn't go. So she was like,
that's we got to I want them to see this exhibition,
so we're going to figure out a way to make
it happen, and she did just that. She reached out
to another faculty member at Sophie Newcombe College, which was
a college for white women, and they were able to
get all the students, all of Elizabeth's students, taken or
(16:55):
right up to the door of the art museum. It
was on a Monday that it was closed to the
rest of the people, the rest of the people being
the white people, because those are the people who could
go there. And so the students all gathered and then
they had this person who was there from the college
who was able to tell them more about, you know, everything,
all the art that was there in the museum. And
(17:16):
Elizabeth said that some of the students loved the work
and some hated the work, but nobody was bored. I'm
just in my head, I picture like in the quote
she talks about how they were running from this room
to that room, and I just imagined this large group
of students super excited. It was the first time for
many of them that they had ever even been to
(17:38):
an art museum period. And I love art museums. I
love being at art museums. They bring me so much
comfort and joy, and just to think about like it
being their first time and it being in a place
where like black people don't even step foot in at all,
and you have, you know, you have all of these
people in the museum for the first time, going our
(18:01):
being able to critique it, seeing it up close in person,
and having that experience with it. It seems very edifying.
So onto the summer of nineteen forty one, she's in Chicago.
She's studying ceramics and lithography there. While she's there, she
also meets this guy named Charles White, and she ended
(18:23):
up marrying him very soon after that. And there she
was also surrounded by this really lively, creative community that
was also I think a lot of the people who
are listening know a little bit about Chicago at the time.
Very there are a lot of people there who are
in the arts, who are socially and politically engaged. And
this is a quote from Elizabeth Catlett. She said, we
(18:45):
would meet at each other's houses and we would get
together socially and discuss things and talk about creative things,
and people would read things and we would look at
each other's work. End quote. So there's this kind of
salon situation happening where everybody's talking and sharing ideas and
seemingly a very sincere, authentic, natural way. And many of
(19:12):
these artists that were around her were dedicated to creating
art for social change. Eventually, though, in nineteen forty two,
Elizabeth and her husband Charles, they moved to New York
and they were connected with I mean all these names
names that a lot of names you would know, people
like Ernie Krishlowe Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolen Bennett, a
(19:36):
bunch of other black artists. They started being in circles with,
and during her first summer there in New York, she
also worked with the sculptor name Osip zach Keene, and
he had just gotten to New York after leaving Nazi
occupation in France, and what he encouraged her to do
(19:56):
was work more with abstraction and to look for African
art for inspiration. But he kind of had while she
was like, I'm making stuff for my people, I'm making
the things that I'm used to singing. I'm making art
about the things that I'm used to seeing. He was like, no,
art should be international, Why does it have to be
limited to this? She wanted to make work she thought
(20:17):
her audience would relate to, so she was focusing on
black subjects. So they were kind of there was some
friction there between the two of them and that thinking.
And of course her wanting to focus on black subjects
is in line with the advice that she got from
her teacher, who we talked about earlier. Grant would so
(20:38):
Elizabeth making her own work, you know, working in her
own practice, still teaching now, she goes back to teaching
at the George Washington Carver School from nineteen forty four
until nineteen forty six. I'm going to say I love
every part. I'm going to say I love this part
A million times in her story because I just her
story is really fascinating and I really admire the work
(20:59):
that she did. But yeah, so she taught students who
had working class day jobs, and she would teach them
things like sculpture and sewing. And she was the school's
promotion director. I'm not fully sure what that job entailed,
but she was called the school's promotion director. And she
(21:20):
tells stories from her time at school. She talks about
how there was a class call it how to make
a dress, and there was another one called how to
make a Hat that one of her colleagues taught. But
when she was talking about the how to make a
dress class, she mentioned how this one person looked fabulous
in the dress that they made, and she talked about
the kind of practical tips that she gave them to
(21:40):
be able to sew. So that was that was a
cool part of her story. But there is another part
of her story where it seems to have functioned as
a sort of awakening for her and when it comes
to class consciousness. So one day she said there was
a professor from Juilliard who came to play a symphony
for the students, and the professor invited them to take
(22:01):
a break between the first and second movements. He was like,
all right, I know that was a lot, y'all, go
take a break, go drink something. And the students were like, no,
I don't want to take a break. Let's keep going,
let's move forward. And Elizabeth had this idea that they
weren't interested in classical music. She thought had she thought
(22:22):
she was like, I had been ignorant to that fact.
And these experiences that she had in this school, she said,
were kind of a catalyst for the work that she
wanted to do. And here's another quote from her. She said,
I always had a superior feeling to these people. I
felt superior to my grandmother, who had been a house slave.
I thought she should have been a field slave. And
(22:43):
I felt superior to my other grandmother, who sowed sacks
at the post office in Washington, because she had never
gone to school. And then Elizabeth went on to say
this as well, and I realized that I had a
debt that I hadn't paid, I'd had privileges that they
hadn't had. That didn't make me superior, it made me luckier.
(23:04):
So clearly a moment of humility, she had to humble
herself here and just like self awareness for her to
be able to admit that to herself and then change course,
because I think it's kind of it's pretty relatable to
(23:25):
think about in these days too, because I feel like
there's so much that I have in twenty twenty five
that I take for granted, and it's easy to kind
of like lose sight of those things when you have
a level of comfort and convenience that comes along with
living the way that you do when you grow up,
and you know, with a relative amount of privilege. So
(23:47):
I appreciated her saying that out loud, and also really
interesting to think about from someone who also I mean,
she was living in the early nineteen hundred. Still, it's
not like things were all and roses there either. And
she was also already before this pretty aware of what
clear I surmise you know, what enslavement meant, because she
(24:13):
she'd heard all those stories about her grandparents and great
great grandparents. So yet very fascinating thing to hear her say.
But so her work at the Carver School ended up
inspiring her to get a Julius rosenwal Fun Fellowship to
produce a series of artworks on black women. Now, she
didn't make a lot of progress on that, another moment
(24:35):
of being like, I'm doing this teaching stuff, not having
so much time for my own things. So here comes
a big turn in her life of her going to Mexico.
Nineteen forty six. She and her husband went there. Her
marriage wasn't doing so hot at the time, but they
went to Mexico. She had become interested in murals and
graphic art, and these are a big part of Mexican
(24:57):
cultural and artistic history. So she had become interested in
the art that was being made there after the Mexican Revolution,
and she was really inspired by the art work and
how it was so socially engaged, the consciousness that was there,
and how accessible it was for everyday people. And her
plan was to stay in Mexico City for just a year,
(25:19):
studying sculpture at a government run school and making prints
at the Tayerra de Graphica popular the People's Graphic Arts workshop.
But what actually happened was that her marriage kind of
blew up. She went back to the US to end it, yeah,
and then ended up going back to Mexico in nineteen
forty seven, and eventually she worked toward establishing permanent residents there.
(25:46):
So another part of her story that I'm like, I
was just like, WHOA, that's a big deal, right, Like,
that's a huge deal. I mean she had already moved
different places in the United States and done so many
different jobs since she graduated. But yeah, saying I'm going
(26:10):
to stay somewhere for a year, and then that going
to being I'm no longer with the person I was
married to, and I'm going back to that place outside
of the country to work on my own art alone
at the time now seemingly because it seems like it
was pretty quick that she fell in love with someone
else and his name was Francisco Mora. A little scandalous, right,
(26:35):
but he was an artist at the workshop as well,
and they ended up getting married very soon, like nineteen
forty seven. So her series The Negro Woman that she
made from like nineteen forty six to nineteen forty seven
is made up of fifteen linoleum cuts with captions, and
(26:58):
she pretty much she she immediately ingrained herself in that workshop.
She immediately started working on art there. She had three sons.
She had a son board in nineteen forty seven, one
born in forty nine, and then another born in nineteen
fifty one, and eventually they all became artists themselves too.
(27:20):
But yes, so you start to see the evolution of
her prints that she was doing because she was making
a lot, it's a lot of volume here through this workshop.
At first, these prints that she was creating, they had
a lot of harsh lines. Things were pretty angular in
the prints, and by the early nineteen fifties they ended
(27:41):
up becoming softer and more rounded. And she would make
these prints at the workshops in the evening, at the
workshop in the evenings, and then on Friday nights she
would go to the collective meetings, and so at these meetings,
because it was a socially engaged workshop, people would come
from other organizations asking for images that would support whatever
(28:01):
mission that that was critical to them at the time.
So the people in the workshop, including Elizabeth, would make
prints for them to be able to distribute as part
of uplifting their causes. And so Elizabeth ended up creating
images of working women, laborers, like indigenous children, black mothers,
so on, and so forth, all these people that she
(28:22):
cared about that she was engaged in their causes, and
she was seeing these movements happened around her in the
United States and in Mexico. She herself was politically engaged.
In nineteen fifty eight, she actually ended up being arrested
at a railroad workers protest. So she got arrested at
this protest, and the next year, nineteen fifty nine, this
(28:49):
is when her next first comes into play. So she
was the first woman's sculpture professor at the National School
of Fine Arts at the National Autonomous New Recipe of Mexico,
and she taught there for many years until nineteen seventy five.
And she talked about how she was kind of moving
(29:13):
through two different worlds in the workshop and then in
her work as a professor. Of course, one is more
socially engaged, she's making this work for herself, and the
other one is her work as an educator. She said,
I'm thinking differently in the two mediums. In the printmaking,
I'm thinking about something social or political, and in the sculpture,
I'm thinking about form. But I'm also thinking about women,
(29:36):
black women. And it is clear too that in her printmaking,
like and across all of these spaces, she was thinking
about women and black women. But she sculpted in a
lot of different mediums. She sculpted in wood, stone, clay,
sometimes she cast in bronze, and she was inspired by
African and Prespanic sculpture. She said that she was inspired
(29:58):
by black not the female news of the European artists,
but the women of the African wood carvers and the
pre Hispanic stone carvers. And she also even called out
the fact that, you know, abstract art was born in Africa.
So some of that encouragement that she had got earlier
in her days about turning to African sculpture as an
(30:21):
inspiration for her work still stayed with her, and so
she was deeply engaged and rooted in that work. At
the same time. You know, like I said, in nineteen
fifty eight, she had been arrested for going to this protest.
So in the United States there was this whole Macarthy era.
(30:45):
People were super afraid of communism, and the Graphic Arts
Workshop that she was working with was deemed a Communist
front organization, and because Elizabeth was involved with it, the
US embassy ended up harassing her throughout the nineteen fifth
and they actually banned her from even returning to the
United States. In nineteen sixty two, Okay, so not great,
(31:11):
but also not totally a problem for Elizabeth because in
nineteen sixty two she became a Mexican citizen. So she said,
I always got something for y'all. I always know how
to turn on a heel and know how to pivot. Okay,
nobody's gonna hold me down. She was also, of course,
not discouraged from, you know, still being uplifting the civil rights,
(31:34):
black power and other movements that were happening in the
United States at the time, and actually in January of
nineteen seventy her work was featured in an Ebony magazine
article called My art Speaks for both my peoples, and
of course she's talking about the Mexican people's and her
people in the United States, and pretty cool to see
(31:58):
how she had really stepped into this new culture in
Mexico that she had been inspired by before she got there,
and then when she got there, it was like it
seemed like it was one of those things. It was
like it was everything I hoped it would be, because
you know, you can get somewhere and you're like, I
studied all this stuff about Mexican muralism, but when I
got there, things weren't feeling the same. Well, clearly what
(32:21):
she got was what she needed when she went to
Mexico and was able to really assimilate and grow in
that environment. So yeah, that article in Ebony got her
more attention and got her invitations to show her work
in the United States, and she kept being denied entry
into the United States until nineteen seventy one, where she
(32:44):
finally got a visa to go to the opening of
her solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which
was her first show in the United States since she
exhibited her Negro Woman series in nineteen forty seven nineteen
forty eight, and that series was later renamed The Black Woman.
So yeah. She retired from teaching in nineteen seventy five,
(33:06):
but she didn't stop making work. In nineteen ninety two,
she made a series of osset lithographs with her old
friend Margaret Walker Alexander, and the prints that she made
accompanied text from Margaret's poem for My People. So really
nice to see the continuity of their friendship and them
(33:28):
being able to collaborate in that way. And she was
also still a person of the people and exhibited her
work to express that she would show her work in
community centers, public libraries, HBCUs, galleries, museums, all types of places,
so that all types of people could be able to
access those shows and enjoy her work. And in two
(33:53):
thousand and two she got her US citizenship back and
became a dual citizen in the United States in Mexico
and Yeah, and continued to make her work. Her son,
her youngest son, helped her with her sculptures in her
later years, and in April of twenty ten, just after
she turned ninety five, her sculpture of Mahalia Jackson was
(34:14):
unveiled in New Orleans. A lot of public sculptures of
hers that were put out, and she died on April second,
twenty twelve, in Cornovaca, Mexico, when she was ninety six
years old. Yeah, and that is the story of Elizabeth Catlet.
(34:43):
I'm so glad that you shared this with us.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
She does have so many fantastic as you said, like
pivots or things that I love that she was clearly
developing her ideas and thoughts but was opened to changing
or having that kind of moment of humility or things
like that. But I do I also love the museum
(35:07):
story where she was just determined to share this passion
with younger people and knowing that she found a way
and she was I also agreeve, So that's just a
thinking about that and like the joy and having the
critique and being so excited about that. That's just a
(35:29):
beautiful moment that she made happen. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah. And the way she thought about art was that
it was a necessary part of education, and there were
a lot of people who didn't fully have access to
things like museums, So I mean there is a dissonance
there was like, Okay, it's a necessary part of education,
but everybody can't be educated in this way. So it
(35:55):
was clear that she was like, what ways can I
make this more accessible? And I mean her work, I
mean prints and printmaking is one of the most you know,
accessible forms of being able to deliver art to a
wide audience in the first place, and is one that
so many of us even to this day are familiar
with interacting with and is a vehicle for so much
(36:18):
propaganda of different different parts of the spectrum, but also
like just popular art. And so it's clear that she
showed that through that form of her own personal art
making and then showed that through like making sculpture for
public spaces, but also sculptures of people like like Mahelia Jackson,
(36:40):
who is also part of popular culture that a lot
of people would be familiar with, and then also just
through literally educating people as a professor. So it was
like she was able to take that mission and disseminated
in all of the parts of her life that she
was sharing her art in, which I really appreciate, but
just all so I appreciate that like she had a
(37:03):
change of heart or change of mind, or she came
to a new understanding and she acted on that so
quickly and thoroughly comprehensively, and how she shared her art,
it was like, oh, I've been enlightened, my class consciousness
has changed, and so I'm going to so dramatically figure
(37:26):
out a way for my lived way of sharing my
art to reflect my new consciousness. And I really appreciate
that as an artist because it's like it's sometimes you're
learning new things all the time, and as an artist,
you might want to do new things or do things
in a different way, and you're wondering how do I
(37:46):
do that? And so to see her enacted so you know,
courageously and maybe not fearlessly, I don't know, but in
a way that was like, I'm committed to it. I'm
committed to the cause of going forth, pressing forward. I'm
on the front line and I'm going to get it done.
And so it's cool to see that part of her story.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
I mean, she's definitely the tale of just living life
in change. And we've been doing talking about activists who
are artists, are people who even call themselves like artivists
because we understand things like art does bring a lot
of insight and like political change and political shifts, and
we know printmaking historically is about rebellion and able to
(38:34):
communicate with others, oftentimes in a way that was not
a thing previously. So having her doing these things all
through her life as a part of teaching as well
as spreading, as well as understanding the importance behind its phenomenal,
Like that's her life story, is bringing about change as
she is changing and also teaching how to make change happen.
(38:56):
That's a phenomenal way of being also great art.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah yes, beautiful yeah, beautiful yes, beautiful thing too, Like
for those who saw maybe her show in the forties
and then had to wait thirty years because they didn't
go to Mexico or weren't having accessibility to see the shows.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
And then having her come back in the seventies to
do finally another show, what kind of excitement, Like if
you've been studying art and you know about this, like
oh my god, it's happening, It's happening. Like the joy
of seeing her arm live again, I couldn't imagine. I
just thought it, like, wow, that's thirty year difference and
waiting for that to happen.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
That's actually a good point because it kind of I
could see how it could kind of it's clear that
the American like black American audiences embraced her artwork and
realized what she was doing at the time and appreciated
her work from a you know, technical and also contextual
like you know, mindset. But I think it's interesting to
(39:54):
think that like she it could feel like she's the
one that got away, Like it's it was brain drained,
like this amazing skilled person, this amazing talent, this amazing
mind that you forced out of the United States. You know.
Of course there was agency in her going to Mexico.
She wanted to study there, but she was also being
(40:15):
denied her place in the United States, the place that
she was born, because of you know, natural the racism
that always existed there, but also all of the other
you know, anti communist sentiment and all of the other
problematic things that were happening at the time that made
it so that she was basically an undesirable to the
(40:35):
United States government, you know, kept her out of it.
So it was like the one that got away. It's like,
this is my person and she's saying, these are my
two peoples, Like this is my people. Those people in
United States saying she's my people, and she's saying, these
are my people. But like we can't be together, we
can't be you know, I'm not welcome there. And so
(40:57):
I would imagine it's like it's like it was kind
of a could be a homecoming for her where it's
like I'm back to this place that really charged and enlivened,
enlightened you know, my work and you know my manner
of thinking. So yeah, I think that's a good a
(41:19):
good thing to think about, Samantha, that distance that was
created and coming back after that long time, good works,
beautiful art.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yes, I also do a door that her and Margaret
stayed closed. Yeah, we love a good story of a friendship.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
That's I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, yes, yes, well definitely check out the art listeners
if you haven't seen it, it's really amazing and thank
you so much Eves for making the time coming at
us from from Cape Town.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
We always love having you. Where can the good listeners
find you? Y'all can find me. You can just go
to my website, which is Eves Jeffcote dot com. That's
spelled y V E S J E F F c
A T dot com. You can sign up for my
newsletter there. You can pretty much get to all of
the other things from there, but you can also go
(42:18):
to my Instagram I'm at Not Apologizing and you can
message me contact me through there as well, and you
can hear me on many other episodes of Stuff Mom
Never Told You with female first talking about women's accomplishments
in history.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Yes, and go check out all of that stuff if
you haven't already, listeners. If you would like to contact us,
you can or email is hello at stuff I've Never
Told You dot com. We're also on Blue Skype Mom
Stuff Podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at Stuff I've
Never told you. We have a YouTube channel, we have
some merchandise at Cotton Bureau, and we have a book
you can get where if you get your books. Thanks
(42:56):
as always, stare A super Disi Christina Executive PRUSA Maya
and our contruder Joey. Thank you and thanks to you
for listening stuff never told you Inspection by Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can check
out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or where you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to stuff I've never told you production of iHeartRadio.
And it is time for another edition of Female First,
the last of twenty twenty five, which means that we
are once again thrilled to be joined by the brilliant,
(00:27):
the brainy Eves.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome ees, I like Brany, Thank you Brandy. That's fun.
Yeah right, I'm mixing up. It's very before. I don't
know why I was just giving like WB cartoons. I
don't know that is what I just thought. Yes, that
should have scared me.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
It should. I think it was we are all of
our cartoons were a little bit eccentric, like you realize that.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, we my brothers for some reason, probably because I
was a pushover, they got to choose what cartoons we
watched in the morning, and they would choose like Pinky
in the Brain, all these cartoons that just scared me,
and I'd go to school like a little unseppled.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Is it because a rat was trying to take over
the world?
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Maybe I think it was more just vibes.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I don't think it had a feeling to it, and
the animation style was kind of just started out.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It was dark, yeah, writ and stimpy Pinky and the Rain.
I think this is where we are, like why adults
swim in those cartoons and then things like Bob's Burgers
all that are so like a part of our lives
and so popular in our in our generation because of
stuff like that because it was cartoon but with adult
(01:45):
meaning that we did not understand.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, where is this longitudinal study on how those impacted
our psychology? Though?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Like?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
What is what? What was the effect of those?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Deep dive?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
He should?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I would love I bet someone has looked into it,
because there was a very particular aesthetic, and even the
educational ones like do you do you all remember hysteria?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
It was like a hysteros.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I don't remember that one. I might be getting the
name wrong, but it was history. It was a history show, okay,
and it was kind of like animaniacs. I didn't like
that one either. I didn't like it either.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
It sounds like that sounds like a.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Deep cut ny I didn't sounds vaguely familiar, but I
can't quite remember it. That's gonna be something that we
have to look down the road.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I actually frequently end up talking about old cartoons with
random people.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Uh, well, Eves, how have you been What have you
been up to?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I've been good for the most part. I've been pretty good.
It's hard not to be good when you're in such
lovely surrounds. I am in Cape Town now because I
live here now, so I get to see I get
to see these beautiful mountains every day and the day
a long. Hey, I think you know, that's one thing
that's really helping me out, because I think I do
have a tendency to get some seasonal depression, and I'm
(03:08):
living that what do they call it chasing the sun?
It has another name. I feel like I'm living that
life where I get to pretend I'm like those rich
people who like go from like where it's cold, and
they're like, I don't want to be here because it's
cold warm and it's snowburts, and then it's about to
be old there and they go to the other place
where it's warm. So uh, I faked my you know,
(03:30):
fake it till you make it. I left the gold
of where I was and came here to the warmth. Actually,
I was in India right before this, and that was
a great time as well. Loved it there, can't wait
to go back. But but here, yeah, long to be
experiencing the exact opposite of what my body usually experienced.
Is at this time, which is the longest day of
(03:52):
the year, and it being very warm right now. I
think it's very good for my for my psyche, for
my general health, for my mental health, for all of it.
So it's definitely helping me out here. So I'm grateful
for it. I love that.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And I will tell you, just like in the zoom call,
you are glowing from the sunlight behind you, so you
look that as well, so it's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Thank you. I have to say, I think my skin
took a hit while I was in New Delhi, so
I think I've been recovering since I got here. Be
real about that. Like I got to the city and
I'm I like cities a lot, but like New Delhi
is the citiest of all the cities, the city city
high city with the capital t top tier, and I
(04:40):
think like that definitely took a toll on my scan.
So I've recovered in this a few weeks that I've
been here so far, So thank you for noticing.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
That descriptor of the city was really on point.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I mean it.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I was like, yeah, okay, I will say here in
Georgia as is gloomy and dry for the first time
at the same time humid. My face is not loving
it either. I'm like, I'm filling that. But maybe it's
just this again, the seasonal thing with all the depression
is just adding to my face.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, y'all had a cold snap there recently.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yes, we're slowly coming out of it.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yes, sorry, today it is rainy and very dark. I
actually like the rain, but I hate when I have
to work during I like to like watch it out
my window.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
She likes to be a part of the Emo moment staring.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
At in the rain. You know, I was an EMO kid.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I know.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I was like, what video was that with Hillary Duff?
Was that? Come clean? Were she's staring out at the
window with the rain drops on it?
Speaker 1 (05:42):
You have.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
The poster child of emo. Okay, clearly you see what
were my mind go?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Where?
Speaker 3 (05:53):
What kind of kid I was? I didn't have a face.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Okay, let's just say even when it's dark, is still
not dark? Going than that?
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I love that for you.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
But also, Hillary Duff just came out with a new
album not too long ago.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
You are she could be emo in that. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I think she said it was for her queer fans
are gay fans. She was like, this is for my
gay friends, This is for y'all.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Okay, okay, everybody get one. I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I'm sure there's gay emo people who would also love
a gay emo band.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Oh sure, yeah, you know. I'm not familiar with her work,
but I know people of all kinds enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
So oh this is gone left.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I don't know how how we got from old cartoons
to Hillary Duff, but it's a natural progression, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, I am very excited to talk about who you
brought today, Eves. I was looking at some I always
love when I get to look at art when we're
doing these, and I was just really enjoying looking at
the art.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
So who are we talking about today? Today? We're talking
about Elizabeth Catlett, and I have to say, I am
so excited to talk about her. I'm truly excited. I
am biased, and I love when we get to talk
about people and artistic mediums here in general, too, So
there is that, but I just love her story. It
is one of lots of reinvention and her having going
(07:32):
into a lot of different directions, and I really appreciate
that about her story. But I also love being able
to look at her art work because it is really marvelous.
So anybody who gets a chance to see anything in
person or you know, check out stuff peruse Elizabeth Catlet's
work online, please do so. But her first is that
(07:54):
she was the first woman to get an mfan sculpture
from the University of Iowa, and she was the first
woman sculpture professor at the National School of Fine Arts
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. So she had
a couple of first and she had a very long
(08:16):
and illustrious career which I'm looking forward to talking about.
So Elizabeth was born on April fifteen, nineteen fifteen, in Washington,
d c. Her grandparents were enslaved, and as a child,
(08:39):
she heard stories of her great great grandmother, who had
been pregnant when she was kidnapped from Madagascar and enslaved
in the United States. She had also heard about her
grandmother's enslavement and how her grandparents learned to read and write. Unfortunately,
her father died some months before she was born. He
(09:01):
had been a math professor at Tuskegee and he taught
in the public school system in DC. He also had
artistic side, so he was a musician and a wood carver.
Her mother, on the other hand, was a truant officer.
She also helped support the family that way, and Elizabeth
had two older siblings, so it was very early on.
(09:24):
Clearly she already had in her parents' role models in
people who cared about education, and they cared about the
arts as well, and Elizabeth knew early on that she
wanted to be an artist. Now, of course, at the time,
this was the early nineteen hundreds, there weren't a lot
of black women who were practicing artists, but this was
still an aim of hers. She ended up graduating from
(09:47):
Dunbar High School in nineteen thirty one, and she applied
to art schools as she was graduating from high school,
and she did end up getting into the Carnegie Institute
of Technology which is now Carnegie Mellon. But she was black,
which she couldn't help. But she was black, and they
were like, that's not going to fly with us. You're
not getting in, So it doesn't matter how well you
(10:07):
did at your Infrances exams. You're not coming in to
our school. She went to Howard University instead. Great school,
so it's like great, she went to Howard University instead,
screw you other people. She studied design, printmaking, drawing, painting,
art history, all of the art things when she was
(10:29):
at Howard, and you can see that there was a
lot of influence for her at Howard and going on
to the rest of her artistic and professional life. James
Porter was one of her teachers, and she later said
that he helped her develop the discipline necessary to be
an artist, which is a lot of the battle. So
(10:49):
clearly that had an impact on her. So through her
education at Howard, she was also surrounded by the artistic
thought that came along with the Harlem Renaissance, surrounded by
a lot of the people who were thinking about concepts
that were related to race. So she had the best
of both worlds, seemingly. So she was surrounded by all
(11:11):
of this critical thought, all of this artistic thought, and
then she had somebody who was helping her with her discipline.
So I could just imagine that there was so much
that was being fomented, so much that was welling up
in her because she was getting the skill and the
aptitude of things, and she was also able to work
through all these different ideas and a lot of them
(11:33):
were competing ideas, not everybody agreed with each other. So
there was Alan Locke who was a philosophy professor at
Howard and he was also an important figure in the
Harlem Renaissance, and he was really about this whole racialism
and art side of things, versus her teacher, James Porter.
Elizabeth's teacher, James Porter, was not so much in that wheelhouse.
(11:55):
He wasn't so much about racializing so much in his art.
So at the same time, Elizabeth herself was drawn to
African art and black subjects. But she did say that
wasn't so much about doctor Alan Locke's viewpoints, and it
was more about the fact that there were other artists
(12:15):
that were also focusing on black subjects. And that makes
a lot of sense too, because it's like you're surrounded
by this. This is a lot of what you're seeing.
So she was clearly influenced by that. But yeah, so
she continued school. In nineteen thirty five, she got her
bachelors and she was Kumbloudie and then after school she
(12:37):
moved to Durham, North Carolina, and in Durham, she basically
jumped right into education, following in her parents' footsteps. She
taught art in the public schools, but you know, as
is wont to happen, she wasn't so focused on her
own art and she went to grad school at the
(12:58):
State University of Iowa later the Universe of Iowa in
Iowa City. She's like, it's taught for me to get
back to my own art. She was only one of
just two black students in the art department there. And
I think if y'all once y'all heard University of Iowa,
y'all were probably like, yes, she's probably not that many
other black students in the art department there. It's also
(13:20):
the early nineteen hundreds, Okay, makes sense. But she it
was actually fortuitous because she made a lifelong friend there.
She had to live in off campus housing because black
students couldn't stay in the dorms. The other the student,
the other black student who was also her roommate, was
Margaret Walker, and she remained her friend and colleague for
(13:43):
the rest of her life. So while she was at
the University of Iowa, she was studying drawing and painting.
And she had this other teacher, Grant Wood, who also
left a big mark on her. He was a painter.
So Elizabeth became interested in sculpture, but her teacher, Grant
(14:03):
would He was like, you, you should make what you
know and that'll be the best subject of your art.
So this is how he encouraged her to make art.
And you'll see this show up in her commentary about
her work and in some of the work she did.
(14:24):
As we'll talk about going forward. She got the first
Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture that was awarded
at the University of Ioue. At this point, it's her
first and then the main piece she had to have
an exhibition at the end of her time in the school.
In her nineteen forty exhibition was a limestone sculpture called
(14:44):
Negro Mother and Child. And this is what she said
in her thesis statement. She said, to create a composition
of two figures, one smaller than the other, so interlaced
as to be expressive of maternity, and so compact as
to be suitable to stone seemed a desirable problem. The
implications of motherhood, especially Negro motherhood, are quite important to
(15:05):
me as I am a Negro as well as a woman.
That's the end of the quote. So she's already getting
into kind of a The best subject of your art
is what you know about, and it's also a lot
of what she was surrounded surrounded by in her actual
lived experience, and also a lot of the other art
that she was saying what it was representing. So that sculpture,
(15:29):
she actually sent off a picture to it because this
was part of what she needed to be able to graduate,
basically to be in a national exposition, And she sent
off a picture to it and got accepted into the
American Negro Exposition in Chicago that summer, and she actually
got the first place award in sculpture there, so that
was pretty cool. And in the fall of nineteen forty
(15:52):
she started teaching at Diller University in New Orleans. She
taught drawing, painting, printmaking, art history, and I'm just like
you weren't really teaching all the things like you have
to be very adept at something to be able to
share it with people. And she did all of those
things in her practice and in her and in studying
(16:13):
and in her she would go on to do in
her practice and then she was also sharing all of
those with everyone, which is really cool to see, and
there are other things we'll talk about it she shared
with people. So this story, I love this story in
her biography. So she wanted her students to see a
Picasso retrospective at the Del Gatto Museum, which is now
the New Orleans Museum of Art, but it was in
(16:34):
a park where black folks couldn't go. So she was like,
that's we got to I want them to see this exhibition,
so we're going to figure out a way to make
it happen, and she did just that. She reached out
to another faculty member at Sophie Newcombe College, which was
a college for white women, and they were able to
get all the students, all of Elizabeth's students, taken or
(16:55):
right up to the door of the art museum. It
was on a Monday that it was closed to the
rest of the people, the rest of the people being
the white people, because those are the people who could
go there. And so the students all gathered and then
they had this person who was there from the college
who was able to tell them more about, you know, everything,
all the art that was there in the museum. And
(17:16):
Elizabeth said that some of the students loved the work
and some hated the work, but nobody was bored. I'm
just in my head, I picture like in the quote
she talks about how they were running from this room
to that room, and I just imagined this large group
of students super excited. It was the first time for
many of them that they had ever even been to
(17:38):
an art museum period. And I love art museums. I
love being at art museums. They bring me so much
comfort and joy, and just to think about like it
being their first time and it being in a place
where like black people don't even step foot in at all,
and you have, you know, you have all of these
people in the museum for the first time, going our
(18:01):
being able to critique it, seeing it up close in person,
and having that experience with it. It seems very edifying.
So onto the summer of nineteen forty one, she's in Chicago.
She's studying ceramics and lithography there. While she's there, she
also meets this guy named Charles White, and she ended
(18:23):
up marrying him very soon after that. And there she
was also surrounded by this really lively, creative community that
was also I think a lot of the people who
are listening know a little bit about Chicago at the time.
Very there are a lot of people there who are
in the arts, who are socially and politically engaged. And
this is a quote from Elizabeth Catlett. She said, we
(18:45):
would meet at each other's houses and we would get
together socially and discuss things and talk about creative things,
and people would read things and we would look at
each other's work. End quote. So there's this kind of
salon situation happening where everybody's talking and sharing ideas and
seemingly a very sincere, authentic, natural way. And many of
(19:12):
these artists that were around her were dedicated to creating
art for social change. Eventually, though, in nineteen forty two,
Elizabeth and her husband Charles, they moved to New York
and they were connected with I mean all these names
names that a lot of names you would know, people
like Ernie Krishlowe Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolen Bennett, a
(19:36):
bunch of other black artists. They started being in circles with,
and during her first summer there in New York, she
also worked with the sculptor name Osip zach Keene, and
he had just gotten to New York after leaving Nazi
occupation in France, and what he encouraged her to do
(19:56):
was work more with abstraction and to look for African
art for inspiration. But he kind of had while she
was like, I'm making stuff for my people, I'm making
the things that I'm used to singing. I'm making art
about the things that I'm used to seeing. He was like, no,
art should be international, Why does it have to be
limited to this? She wanted to make work she thought
(20:17):
her audience would relate to, so she was focusing on
black subjects. So they were kind of there was some
friction there between the two of them and that thinking.
And of course her wanting to focus on black subjects
is in line with the advice that she got from
her teacher, who we talked about earlier. Grant would so
(20:38):
Elizabeth making her own work, you know, working in her
own practice, still teaching now, she goes back to teaching
at the George Washington Carver School from nineteen forty four
until nineteen forty six. I'm going to say I love
every part. I'm going to say I love this part
A million times in her story because I just her
story is really fascinating and I really admire the work
(20:59):
that she did. But yeah, so she taught students who
had working class day jobs, and she would teach them
things like sculpture and sewing. And she was the school's
promotion director. I'm not fully sure what that job entailed,
but she was called the school's promotion director. And she
(21:20):
tells stories from her time at school. She talks about
how there was a class call it how to make
a dress, and there was another one called how to
make a Hat that one of her colleagues taught. But
when she was talking about the how to make a
dress class, she mentioned how this one person looked fabulous
in the dress that they made, and she talked about
the kind of practical tips that she gave them to
(21:40):
be able to sew. So that was that was a
cool part of her story. But there is another part
of her story where it seems to have functioned as
a sort of awakening for her and when it comes
to class consciousness. So one day she said there was
a professor from Juilliard who came to play a symphony
for the students, and the professor invited them to take
(22:01):
a break between the first and second movements. He was like,
all right, I know that was a lot, y'all, go
take a break, go drink something. And the students were like, no,
I don't want to take a break. Let's keep going,
let's move forward. And Elizabeth had this idea that they
weren't interested in classical music. She thought had she thought
(22:22):
she was like, I had been ignorant to that fact.
And these experiences that she had in this school, she said,
were kind of a catalyst for the work that she
wanted to do. And here's another quote from her. She said,
I always had a superior feeling to these people. I
felt superior to my grandmother, who had been a house slave.
I thought she should have been a field slave. And
(22:43):
I felt superior to my other grandmother, who sowed sacks
at the post office in Washington, because she had never
gone to school. And then Elizabeth went on to say
this as well, and I realized that I had a
debt that I hadn't paid, I'd had privileges that they
hadn't had. That didn't make me superior, it made me luckier.
(23:04):
So clearly a moment of humility, she had to humble
herself here and just like self awareness for her to
be able to admit that to herself and then change course,
because I think it's kind of it's pretty relatable to
(23:25):
think about in these days too, because I feel like
there's so much that I have in twenty twenty five
that I take for granted, and it's easy to kind
of like lose sight of those things when you have
a level of comfort and convenience that comes along with
living the way that you do when you grow up,
and you know, with a relative amount of privilege. So
(23:47):
I appreciated her saying that out loud, and also really
interesting to think about from someone who also I mean,
she was living in the early nineteen hundred. Still, it's
not like things were all and roses there either. And
she was also already before this pretty aware of what
clear I surmise you know, what enslavement meant, because she
(24:13):
she'd heard all those stories about her grandparents and great
great grandparents. So yet very fascinating thing to hear her say.
But so her work at the Carver School ended up
inspiring her to get a Julius rosenwal Fun Fellowship to
produce a series of artworks on black women. Now, she
didn't make a lot of progress on that, another moment
(24:35):
of being like, I'm doing this teaching stuff, not having
so much time for my own things. So here comes
a big turn in her life of her going to Mexico.
Nineteen forty six. She and her husband went there. Her
marriage wasn't doing so hot at the time, but they
went to Mexico. She had become interested in murals and
graphic art, and these are a big part of Mexican
(24:57):
cultural and artistic history. So she had become interested in
the art that was being made there after the Mexican Revolution,
and she was really inspired by the art work and
how it was so socially engaged, the consciousness that was there,
and how accessible it was for everyday people. And her
plan was to stay in Mexico City for just a year,
(25:19):
studying sculpture at a government run school and making prints
at the Tayerra de Graphica popular the People's Graphic Arts workshop.
But what actually happened was that her marriage kind of
blew up. She went back to the US to end it, yeah,
and then ended up going back to Mexico in nineteen
forty seven, and eventually she worked toward establishing permanent residents there.
(25:46):
So another part of her story that I'm like, I
was just like, WHOA, that's a big deal, right, Like,
that's a huge deal. I mean she had already moved
different places in the United States and done so many
different jobs since she graduated. But yeah, saying I'm going
(26:10):
to stay somewhere for a year, and then that going
to being I'm no longer with the person I was
married to, and I'm going back to that place outside
of the country to work on my own art alone
at the time now seemingly because it seems like it
was pretty quick that she fell in love with someone
else and his name was Francisco Mora. A little scandalous, right,
(26:35):
but he was an artist at the workshop as well,
and they ended up getting married very soon, like nineteen
forty seven. So her series The Negro Woman that she
made from like nineteen forty six to nineteen forty seven
is made up of fifteen linoleum cuts with captions, and
(26:58):
she pretty much she she immediately ingrained herself in that workshop.
She immediately started working on art there. She had three sons.
She had a son board in nineteen forty seven, one
born in forty nine, and then another born in nineteen
fifty one, and eventually they all became artists themselves too.
(27:20):
But yes, so you start to see the evolution of
her prints that she was doing because she was making
a lot, it's a lot of volume here through this workshop.
At first, these prints that she was creating, they had
a lot of harsh lines. Things were pretty angular in
the prints, and by the early nineteen fifties they ended
(27:41):
up becoming softer and more rounded. And she would make
these prints at the workshops in the evening, at the
workshop in the evenings, and then on Friday nights she
would go to the collective meetings, and so at these meetings,
because it was a socially engaged workshop, people would come
from other organizations asking for images that would support whatever
(28:01):
mission that that was critical to them at the time.
So the people in the workshop, including Elizabeth, would make
prints for them to be able to distribute as part
of uplifting their causes. And so Elizabeth ended up creating
images of working women, laborers, like indigenous children, black mothers,
so on, and so forth, all these people that she
(28:22):
cared about that she was engaged in their causes, and
she was seeing these movements happened around her in the
United States and in Mexico. She herself was politically engaged.
In nineteen fifty eight, she actually ended up being arrested
at a railroad workers protest. So she got arrested at
this protest, and the next year, nineteen fifty nine, this
(28:49):
is when her next first comes into play. So she
was the first woman's sculpture professor at the National School
of Fine Arts at the National Autonomous New Recipe of Mexico,
and she taught there for many years until nineteen seventy five.
And she talked about how she was kind of moving
(29:13):
through two different worlds in the workshop and then in
her work as a professor. Of course, one is more
socially engaged, she's making this work for herself, and the
other one is her work as an educator. She said,
I'm thinking differently in the two mediums. In the printmaking,
I'm thinking about something social or political, and in the sculpture,
I'm thinking about form. But I'm also thinking about women,
(29:36):
black women. And it is clear too that in her printmaking,
like and across all of these spaces, she was thinking
about women and black women. But she sculpted in a
lot of different mediums. She sculpted in wood, stone, clay,
sometimes she cast in bronze, and she was inspired by
African and Prespanic sculpture. She said that she was inspired
(29:58):
by black not the female news of the European artists,
but the women of the African wood carvers and the
pre Hispanic stone carvers. And she also even called out
the fact that, you know, abstract art was born in Africa.
So some of that encouragement that she had got earlier
in her days about turning to African sculpture as an
(30:21):
inspiration for her work still stayed with her, and so
she was deeply engaged and rooted in that work. At
the same time. You know, like I said, in nineteen
fifty eight, she had been arrested for going to this protest.
So in the United States there was this whole Macarthy era.
(30:45):
People were super afraid of communism, and the Graphic Arts
Workshop that she was working with was deemed a Communist
front organization, and because Elizabeth was involved with it, the
US embassy ended up harassing her throughout the nineteen fifth
and they actually banned her from even returning to the
United States. In nineteen sixty two, Okay, so not great,
(31:11):
but also not totally a problem for Elizabeth because in
nineteen sixty two she became a Mexican citizen. So she said,
I always got something for y'all. I always know how
to turn on a heel and know how to pivot. Okay,
nobody's gonna hold me down. She was also, of course,
not discouraged from, you know, still being uplifting the civil rights,
(31:34):
black power and other movements that were happening in the
United States at the time, and actually in January of
nineteen seventy her work was featured in an Ebony magazine
article called My art Speaks for both my peoples, and
of course she's talking about the Mexican people's and her
people in the United States, and pretty cool to see
(31:58):
how she had really stepped into this new culture in
Mexico that she had been inspired by before she got there,
and then when she got there, it was like it
seemed like it was one of those things. It was
like it was everything I hoped it would be, because
you know, you can get somewhere and you're like, I
studied all this stuff about Mexican muralism, but when I
got there, things weren't feeling the same. Well, clearly what
(32:21):
she got was what she needed when she went to
Mexico and was able to really assimilate and grow in
that environment. So yeah, that article in Ebony got her
more attention and got her invitations to show her work
in the United States, and she kept being denied entry
into the United States until nineteen seventy one, where she
(32:44):
finally got a visa to go to the opening of
her solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which
was her first show in the United States since she
exhibited her Negro Woman series in nineteen forty seven nineteen
forty eight, and that series was later renamed The Black Woman.
So yeah. She retired from teaching in nineteen seventy five,
(33:06):
but she didn't stop making work. In nineteen ninety two,
she made a series of osset lithographs with her old
friend Margaret Walker Alexander, and the prints that she made
accompanied text from Margaret's poem for My People. So really
nice to see the continuity of their friendship and them
(33:28):
being able to collaborate in that way. And she was
also still a person of the people and exhibited her
work to express that she would show her work in
community centers, public libraries, HBCUs, galleries, museums, all types of places,
so that all types of people could be able to
access those shows and enjoy her work. And in two
(33:53):
thousand and two she got her US citizenship back and
became a dual citizen in the United States in Mexico
and Yeah, and continued to make her work. Her son,
her youngest son, helped her with her sculptures in her
later years, and in April of twenty ten, just after
she turned ninety five, her sculpture of Mahalia Jackson was
(34:14):
unveiled in New Orleans. A lot of public sculptures of
hers that were put out, and she died on April second,
twenty twelve, in Cornovaca, Mexico, when she was ninety six
years old. Yeah, and that is the story of Elizabeth Catlet.
(34:43):
I'm so glad that you shared this with us.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
She does have so many fantastic as you said, like
pivots or things that I love that she was clearly
developing her ideas and thoughts but was opened to changing
or having that kind of moment of humility or things
like that. But I do I also love the museum
(35:07):
story where she was just determined to share this passion
with younger people and knowing that she found a way
and she was I also agreeve, So that's just a
thinking about that and like the joy and having the
critique and being so excited about that. That's just a
(35:29):
beautiful moment that she made happen. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah. And the way she thought about art was that
it was a necessary part of education, and there were
a lot of people who didn't fully have access to
things like museums, So I mean there is a dissonance
there was like, Okay, it's a necessary part of education,
but everybody can't be educated in this way. So it
(35:55):
was clear that she was like, what ways can I
make this more accessible? And I mean her work, I
mean prints and printmaking is one of the most you know,
accessible forms of being able to deliver art to a
wide audience in the first place, and is one that
so many of us even to this day are familiar
with interacting with and is a vehicle for so much
(36:18):
propaganda of different different parts of the spectrum, but also
like just popular art. And so it's clear that she
showed that through that form of her own personal art
making and then showed that through like making sculpture for
public spaces, but also sculptures of people like like Mahelia Jackson,
(36:40):
who is also part of popular culture that a lot
of people would be familiar with, and then also just
through literally educating people as a professor. So it was
like she was able to take that mission and disseminated
in all of the parts of her life that she
was sharing her art in, which I really appreciate, but
just all so I appreciate that like she had a
(37:03):
change of heart or change of mind, or she came
to a new understanding and she acted on that so
quickly and thoroughly comprehensively, and how she shared her art,
it was like, oh, I've been enlightened, my class consciousness
has changed, and so I'm going to so dramatically figure
(37:26):
out a way for my lived way of sharing my
art to reflect my new consciousness. And I really appreciate
that as an artist because it's like it's sometimes you're
learning new things all the time, and as an artist,
you might want to do new things or do things
in a different way, and you're wondering how do I
(37:46):
do that? And so to see her enacted so you know,
courageously and maybe not fearlessly, I don't know, but in
a way that was like, I'm committed to it. I'm
committed to the cause of going forth, pressing forward. I'm
on the front line and I'm going to get it done.
And so it's cool to see that part of her story.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
I mean, she's definitely the tale of just living life
in change. And we've been doing talking about activists who
are artists, are people who even call themselves like artivists
because we understand things like art does bring a lot
of insight and like political change and political shifts, and
we know printmaking historically is about rebellion and able to
(38:34):
communicate with others, oftentimes in a way that was not
a thing previously. So having her doing these things all
through her life as a part of teaching as well
as spreading, as well as understanding the importance behind its phenomenal,
Like that's her life story, is bringing about change as
she is changing and also teaching how to make change happen.
(38:56):
That's a phenomenal way of being also great art.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah yes, beautiful yeah, beautiful yes, beautiful thing too, Like
for those who saw maybe her show in the forties
and then had to wait thirty years because they didn't
go to Mexico or weren't having accessibility to see the shows.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
And then having her come back in the seventies to
do finally another show, what kind of excitement, Like if
you've been studying art and you know about this, like
oh my god, it's happening, It's happening. Like the joy
of seeing her arm live again, I couldn't imagine. I
just thought it, like, wow, that's thirty year difference and
waiting for that to happen.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
That's actually a good point because it kind of I
could see how it could kind of it's clear that
the American like black American audiences embraced her artwork and
realized what she was doing at the time and appreciated
her work from a you know, technical and also contextual
like you know, mindset. But I think it's interesting to
(39:54):
think that like she it could feel like she's the
one that got away, Like it's it was brain drained,
like this amazing skilled person, this amazing talent, this amazing
mind that you forced out of the United States. You know.
Of course there was agency in her going to Mexico.
She wanted to study there, but she was also being
(40:15):
denied her place in the United States, the place that
she was born, because of you know, natural the racism
that always existed there, but also all of the other
you know, anti communist sentiment and all of the other
problematic things that were happening at the time that made
it so that she was basically an undesirable to the
(40:35):
United States government, you know, kept her out of it.
So it was like the one that got away. It's like,
this is my person and she's saying, these are my
two peoples, Like this is my people. Those people in
United States saying she's my people, and she's saying, these
are my people. But like we can't be together, we
can't be you know, I'm not welcome there. And so
(40:57):
I would imagine it's like it's like it was kind
of a could be a homecoming for her where it's
like I'm back to this place that really charged and enlivened,
enlightened you know, my work and you know my manner
of thinking. So yeah, I think that's a good a
(41:19):
good thing to think about, Samantha, that distance that was
created and coming back after that long time, good works,
beautiful art.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yes, I also do a door that her and Margaret
stayed closed. Yeah, we love a good story of a friendship.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
That's I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, yes, yes, well definitely check out the art listeners
if you haven't seen it, it's really amazing and thank
you so much Eves for making the time coming at
us from from Cape Town.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
We always love having you. Where can the good listeners
find you? Y'all can find me. You can just go
to my website, which is Eves Jeffcote dot com. That's
spelled y V E S J E F F c
A T dot com. You can sign up for my
newsletter there. You can pretty much get to all of
the other things from there, but you can also go
(42:18):
to my Instagram I'm at Not Apologizing and you can
message me contact me through there as well, and you
can hear me on many other episodes of Stuff Mom
Never Told You with female first talking about women's accomplishments
in history.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Yes, and go check out all of that stuff if
you haven't already, listeners. If you would like to contact us,
you can or email is hello at stuff I've Never
Told You dot com. We're also on Blue Skype Mom
Stuff Podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at Stuff I've
Never told you. We have a YouTube channel, we have
some merchandise at Cotton Bureau, and we have a book
you can get where if you get your books. Thanks
(42:56):
as always, stare A super Disi Christina Executive PRUSA Maya
and our contruder Joey. Thank you and thanks to you
for listening stuff never told you Inspection by Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can check
out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or where you
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