Timing is everything.
“Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,’” a remarkably bracing new exhibit stuffed with politics and activism and fascism and standing up for everyday laborers and educators, arrives at the Art Institute of Chicago in a cultural hailstorm. It’s been planned for years, and yet, it’s impossible to visit without immediately thinking about what is happening just beyond the building. It lands at a moment when museums themselves are face mandates to censor, rework and soften histories and politics. It arrives as Chicago itself stands in the sights of the White House.
It also comes directly from the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art, where, presumably, it was exhibit A of what President Trump hates in a museum exhibit. Catlett, who died at 96 in 2012, made art that was, if nothing else, inclusive, meant to be understood by the broadest socioeconomic group possible. Among her topics were Black power and the liberation of Mexican farm workers. She spent decades in exile, stripped of United States citizenship after being granted Mexican citizenship. She’d endured years of investigations by the CIA and FBI, at the peak of the Red Scare. She was classified as an “undesirable alien.” The title of the exhibit — “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” — comes from a talk Catlett gave at Northwestern University in 1970. Because she wasn’t allowed in the country, she made her speech by phone: She told the audience she was denied entry for being “a threat to the well-being of the United States of America,” adding, to the extent the United States is a threat to Black people, “I hope I have earned that honor.”
Catlett, though, was not a caustic voice, but rather, exhilarating, warm, direct.
Before you even enter the show, “Floating Family,” one of her loveliest sculptures, meets you at the entrance. It’s yellow and buttery and smooth and shows a pair of women, presumably a mother and daughter, dangling sideways, linking hands, seemingly being pulled apart. Catlett made it for the Chicago Public Library’s Legler branch in the West Garfield neighborhood. It’s built from Mexican primavera wood and was installed over the circulation desk, where it’s hung since 1995. It returns to the South Side after the show ends in January.
Catlett was 80 then.
“The fact that, after decades as an artist, she could be so thrilled at the prospect of creating a work for a branch library, conveys so much of what Catlett was about,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, the museum’s Art of the Americas curator. “It also holds so much of what she was about — motherhood, education, literacy.”
You know that feeling of being unable to turn away from a piece of art and continue on through an exhibit? “A Black Revolutionary Artist” has moments like that on nearly every wall, starting with the single painting that greets you in the first gallery. “Working Woman,” an image of a Black laborer holding a mop, arrived in 1947, when representations of Black women were rare in art, never mind sympathetic. Oehler: “Her parents are educators, themselves children of enslaved. She grows up in D.C., which is segregated. She’s denied entrance to her first choice of college for being Black. She starts at Howard University in the Depression, at the height of social realism in the U.S. Her dedication to engaging with the world begins early.” The first gallery, full of early works, also show a young artist soaking up influences, without settling on a medium.
The “Floating Family” sculpture hangs above reflected light patterns outside the new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
The “Working Woman” oil painting is displayed, Sept. 2, 2025, in the new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
She attends the University of Iowa for graduate school and studies painting with Grant Wood (and ultimately becomes the first Black student in the country to receive an MFA). She starts sculpting, she starts drawing. She moves to Chicago and studies ceramics at the School of the Art Institute, and lithography at the South Side Community Art Center. She rooms with Margaret Burroughs and meets her first husband, the painter Charles White, and, for a blink in 1941, she’s made a fixture of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
She later calls her Chicago time as the “summer of progress.”
As politically charged as the exhibit feels, as strange as this sounds, Catlett’s work is often, here and there and throughout, charming, without softening its bite. Catlett practiced “aesthetic activism” — that’s how the catalog describes her dedication to perfecting shape and form, to excelling. “This is one of my favorites, notice the deployment of the text, the images,” Oehler said, leading me to “Hats by Suzy White,” which is how it sounds, made with tempera on illustration board, a nice example of Catlett’s early days at Howard as design student, giving an elegant flow and pop of color to fashions and Black models. She shows great taste, and playfulness. The look bleeds later into everything else, and reminds us perfection itself can be a political act.
The centerpiece, the showstopper, is a series that Catlett made during her first trip to Mexico in the mid 1940s. “I Am the Negro Woman” — later retitled by the artist “I Am the Black Woman” in 1989; Catlett never drifts from the times — is composed of prints made from linocuts, similar to woodcut prints but using linoleum. Each print corresponds to a line in a poem posted on the gallery wall. “Her early work culminates here,” Oehler said, walking along a row of small images of Black women sewing and toiling in fields, then portraits of Black activists, from poet Phillis Wheatley to Sojourner Truth.
“Hats by Suzy White,” a graphic design piece, is displayed in the new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
“I am the Negro Woman” linocuts are displayed in the new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
“Then it takes an abrupt turn at the end, an evolution,” Oehler said, “where she says ‘My reward has been barred …’ and ‘I have special reservations,’ and ‘I have special houses,’ which references redlining, and ‘I have a special fear for my loved ones,’ which is about lynching.’ She writes, ‘My right is a future of equality with other Americans.’”
The last figure — like many of her figures — gazes upward, into the sky. The series is also a reminder of the everyday portraits of Black Americans painted by Jacob Lawrence, with whom she was contemporary. “A Black Revolutionary Artist” nods to influences and ideas, to editorial cartoons, propaganda posters and African sculpture, but more frequently, to how her images echo beyond the 20th century, fitting a lineage with Robert Frank, Public Enemy, Romare Bearden …
Actually, there are several showstoppers. Take “Black Unity,” made in 1968, like many of her works from the period, references the Black Panthers. It’s a large squat fist on one side, and a pair of African masks on the other. It’s carved from cedar, placed not far from a linocut of Malcolm X, and almost neighbors to a bust titled “Target Practice” made of an unsettling Black male head inside a gunsight, the face without expression, seemingly too familiar with the situation to be anything but unmoved. It was made in 1970, after the killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampson by Chicago police. It’s built out of bronze. Catlett never did settle on a single material or medium, which the exhibit highlights smartly. There are a handful of paintings, but far more linocuts, and sculptures of limestone, marble, a paper collage, a Warhol-like portrait of Angela Davis on tin foil …
The reverse side of the “Black Unity” sculpture on display in the new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
The new Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
Catlett often referred to her “two peoples,” meaning Black Americans, and Indigenous communities in Mexico, particularly the farm workers she used in her works. She used her work to make connections between the two. When she moved to Mexico, she became a member of Taller de Gráfica Popular, the People’s Graphic Workshop, its explicit mission being to connect art with the everyday struggles of Mexicans, particularly sharecroppers. Her politics were never metaphorical or unclear.
What’s striking in the show is how, unlike a lot of activist art, didacticism here rarely translates into hamfisted preaching or gets less than buoyant. Oehler directed me to a two-sheeted linocut collaboration with TGP’s Alberto Beltran. “The top sheet is almost surrealist, showing this gigantic hand holding back bayonets of a military, while below, in the second sheet, a group of workers, a mother shielding a child. It speaks to Catlett’s ethos as a Black woman, a Black mother, as politically engaged, all encapsulated here.”
One work that isn’t in the exhibit (but can be seen in the catalog) is a bronze statue of Louis Armstrong she made in the 1970s for a park in Louisiana. Catlett hated it and refused to visit it. She found it inert and lifeless, less than her best work, a little too close to the minstrelsy that Armstrong was occasionally accused of perpetrating (and she suspected was what the park’s commissioning organization had expected). Catlett preferred portraits of stoic dignity for her famous subjects. The rest of the time her subjects were anonymous, a close friend or a friend of a friend or a grandchild. There’s an image in the show of a man holding back a skeleton wearing Klan robes, the man’s body draped over a Black child. The man was William Patterson, a Chicagoan who provided legal defense for Black Americans unjustly accused of crimes. He also founded the Abraham Lincoln School for Social Science, mainly for the local proletariat.
It looks great on a gallery wall, but, as intended, it would also fit nicely at a protest.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
“Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’” runs through Jan. 4, 2026, at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.; 312-443-3600 and www.artic.edu
