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All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Revolutionary Art of Elizabeth Catlett on Display at the Brooklyn Museum
00:25:55
A new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum spotlights the work of Black artist Elizabeth Catlett, featuring over 200 works of painting, drawing, and sculpture.
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- [00:02]
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Catherine Morris
Listener support.
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Alison Stewart
WNYC Studios this is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from my well living room. You know why? Thanks for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful you're here and grateful that you'll deal with my croaky voice. Hey, I'll be better in one week. And in one week we will gather for get lit Best selling history author Erik Larson will join us the library to talk about his latest book the Demon of A saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. It examines the months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and and the battle of Fort Sumter and lays out how conflict, misunderstandings and of course the fight to retain slavery led to the split of the Union. Plus, we'll be joined by the 19th century inspired folk duo Sons of Town hall for some music.
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Catherine Morris
Yeah, I was in the washtub and then I went to war. Hard to know how that could be. You were in the footlights and crawling across the floor. Been trying to trace the line between young and old love and war green and gold you and me from dawn to dusk, sky and sea, Line between.
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Alison Stewart
That song's called the Line between from Sons of Town hall. That's next Monday, September 30th. By the way, it's sold out. So if you have tickets, I'll see you there. If not, you can join the live stream and head to wnyc.org getlit that's wnyc.org getlit for more information. Now, let's get this show started with an exhibit about the remarkable and revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett. A new survey show of Elizabeth Catlett's work at the Brooklyn Museum takes its name from something the artist said about herself. Here's a little backstory. In 1962, Catlett, a D.C. native, was a talented, sophisticated artist who was living in Mexico. The US Government decided she would not be allowed back in the United States because of her politics. Yet her art continued to shine worldwide. In 1970, Catlett had been in exile for eight years. So she had to call in a huge to a huge US Conference saying she wanted to attend. In her remarks by phone, she said, I have been and am currently and always hope to be a black revolutionary artist and all that it implies. The show Elizabeth Catlett, A Black Revolutionary Artist and All It Implies looks at the works of Catlett. The New York Times called it, quote, expansive and exhilarating. It's up through January 20, 2025. And our guests are the show's curators, Delilah Scruggs of the American Smithsonian American Art Museum. Hi Delilah.
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Hello.
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It's such an honor to be here.
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Alison Stewart
And Catherine Morris from the Brooklyn Museum. Hi Kathryn.
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Catherine Morris
Hi.
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Alison Stewart
So to understand Catlett, I would like to talk about her background a little bit before the show. And I'm a huge Elizabeth Catlett fan. I actually met her once. I know a lot of the answer these questions, but I'm just gonna put on my, my reporter's hat. Okay. She was born in 1915, granddaughter of enslaved people. Catlett grew up in D.C. delilah, what was her child look like childhood like?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Sure. She grew up in a middle class black neighborhood here in Washington D.C. she went to Dunbar High School, which was the who's who of black intellectuals and artists were amongst that cadre of students and teachers. Early on she kind of nurtured her artistic interest. There's an anecdote in the wonderful monograph by Melanie Herzog about her sculpting out of soap. Even as a high school student, she was already political, aware and active, participating in anti lynching protests. And then she went on to Howard University.
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Alison Stewart
And Katherine, I wanted you to explain. She went to Howard, but first was rejected by Carnegie Mellon. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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Catherine Morris
Yes, that's correct. She was actually admitted to Carnegie Mellon on the basis of her merit as an artist applicant. But when it was discovered by the administration that she was a black American, she was denied matriculation. And thank God for that, because she ended up at Howard at a very opportune moment.
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Alison Stewart
Delilah, what does she mean by an opportune moment to go to Howard for Elizabeth Catlett?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Absolutely. Howard University was and remains really a center of black intellectual and cultural production. The who's who of what we kind of term the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro movement were teachers there. So Alain Locke, James Porter, James Herring, Lois Mayloo Jones, these were people who were, in many cases, her direct teachers. These are the people she took courses with and who shaped her curriculum.
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Alison Stewart
For a brief time, she worked for the wpa and she met Diego Rivera. Catherine, what impact did he have on her?
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Catherine Morris
The impact of the Mexican mural movement writ large. Los Tres Grandes in particular, including Rivera, eventually was part of the what got her to Mexico, which obviously transformed her life and her work for decades. But as a student working under the wpa, the realization of the reality of the cultural outcomes of the Mexican Revolution and Mexicanidad, the notion that at its core in Mexico, there was a creativity within indigenous culture that needed to be forefronted. Catlett took away so many lessons about that, about public. The value of public interactions with art for all people and the value of, as Delilah will probably describe later, also the idea of public art and its impact on people who don't necessarily feel comfortable coming into places like the Brooklyn Museum.
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Alison Stewart
Delilah, for the 1940s. She got her master's at the University of Iowa. I believe she chose to study sculpture. First of all. How would you describe what did she do that was unique with sculpture?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
That's a great question. I think, as she describes in her master's thesis, the very choice to focus on black women and black motherhood was relatively unique. The idea that you could take a universal subject or relatively universal subject, something that shows up in art history as the Madonna and Child shows up in African art, but then place that universal within the body of a black woman. And she learned that in part due to her teacher there, Grant Wood, who instructed her to focus on the subject that she knew best, and in that case, black women.
- [09:05]
Alison Stewart
We're discussing Elizabeth Catlett, a black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies. It's at the Brooklyn Museum. My guests are Catherine Morris of the Brooklyn Museum and Delilah Scruggs of the Smithsonian American Art Art Museum. All right, so we've arrived. When Catlett comes to New York, she's married to artist Charles White. They settled for a time in Harlem. Catherine, you can imagine two artists living in the big city. How are they getting by?
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Catherine Morris
Catlet's time in New York was extraordinary for her, for her development as an artist, for her development as a socially aware political activist, for her engagement across remarkable swaths of the New York art world, or art worlds as we know. There are many, and Catlett found herself in many of them. She found herself in Harlem. She found herself in the village working with working class women and learning about their lives and dreams and the ways that art and culture can be a part of that. And she ended up having lunch with Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller at MoMA. So she was an artist of her time, which is really one of the important parts of our exhibition. She was aware and engaged in the culture and art of her time, including taking classes at the Art Students League and studying privately with the French modernist and cubist Osip Zaitkin. So she was. She was all over the place.
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Alison Stewart
In 1946, she got a Rosenwald scholarship to go to Mexico, and this was a new phase for her life. She divorced and she married again, Francisco Mora. The exhibit calls this a watershed moment. Delilah, what was waiting for her in Mexico?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Well, I want to back up a little bit to New York to explain the pivot in New York. While she's amidst, as Katherine has pointed out, the Carver School and thinking about leftist activism and at the same time mixing with people like Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr, she is working through a conundrum. On the one hand, she is fully aware of the avant garde artistic practices that are being embraced by places like MoMA. And on the other hand, she is incredibly dedicated to the activism that uplifts and centers and speaks to working class people. So in other words, let's say abstraction versus social realism. And she's trying to. She's kind of struggling to find a way to make her work legible and relevant to everyday people. And then when she gets to Mexico, she falls in with, or actually intentionally goes to be amongst the artists collective, the Grafica Popular, the People's Graphic Workshop, a group, really an international group of artists, some European emigres and also Mexican artists, all dedicated to creating a democratic art that speaks to and for the people. And she says all of a sudden her conundrum was resolved and she understood, understood how to make art that was both aesthetically rigorous and politically forward. And she no longer felt that kind of tension anymore. And it was the TGP or the. That allows her to kind of fully realize that synthesis. And it's through strategies like the lino cut and these large additions that she is now able in a kind of realist mode that centers working people, the indigenous people, and class struggle. Those are the things that now became paramount in her practice. And it was so edified and supported because that was what the entire group of artists were working towards.
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Alison Stewart
We're discussing Elizabeth Catlett, a black revolutionary artist, and all that Implies. It's at the brook Museum through January 19, 2025. We'll hear more about the exhibit after a quick break. This is all of it. This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Dalila Scruggs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Kathryn Morris from the Brooklyn Museum. We are talking about Elizabeth Catlett, a black revolutionary artist, and all that It Implies is on view through 1-21-25. So weird to say that Delilah Caitlin did so much work. Sculpture, paintings, lino cuts. How did you decide how to organize the show?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Oh, well, we. We kind of took two approaches simultaneously. We. We have this opportunity to survey 75 years of creative production, and we wanted to show the breadth of her career. So we chose a roughly chronological backbone. But we also, thanks to Catherine, really, who understood this, we also realized that Elizabeth Catlett's monumental Black Woman series was such a major pivot point and really crystallized the core themes that run throughout the exhibition. And so rather than jumping straight into her childhood in the exhibition, when you go to the Brooklyn Museum and you go up to the fourth floor, you enter a gallery that's dedicated to the Black Women series of print and the larger Rosenberg Wall project. And then we back into a chronology, and it gets looser and looser as you go along, but roughly around these core themes.
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Alison Stewart
Catherine, let's talk about that I Am a Black Woman gallery. It's a series of lino cuts created. Many of them depict women of color, sometimes mopping floors on farms, yielding crops. Where did she observe these women? What did she want to show about these women?
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Catherine Morris
Leela has sort of set this up perfectly because in her description of what Catlett discovered and how she sort of came into her power in many ways as an artist in the tgp, what she brought to the TJP was her identity and the work she had done since Iowa around the subject of black womanhood. And so this moment of the Black Woman series is incredibly important and is a wonderful opening to our exhibition because, as you said, it depicts 15 different sort of narrative vignettes, both historical and contemporary, metaphorical and specific. The 15 works are shown in the order that Catlett made them. She titled them, each with a lyrical and pointedly political title that is. Can be read in its entirety as a sort of poem to black women written in the first person, which Delilah has pointed out as such a lovely. And other scholars have pointed out is such an important part of this project. It offers one of the first times, I believe, that through these titles and through these representations of American history in the first person subject, the viewer is asked to embody the lived experience of black women in the United States.
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Alison Stewart
Talilah. There's a picture, working woman, 1947, that was the result of some conversations that Elizabeth Catlett had with a journalist, Marvell Cook. What did they talk about that helped Catlett with her work?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Yeah, okay. Thank you for asking that. I wouldn't say there's necessarily a direct relationship, but she was friends with this Communist Party affiliated, incredible journalist, Marvell Cook and a couple of others. And one of the key ways that activists and journalists during that period were kind of expanding Marxist theory was to inject the topic of gender into it. And so the plight of the black domestic worker became a major theme in the 40s. And Marvell Cook, Ella Baker and others are pointing out the ways that black women domestic laborers are subject to the whims of the white households and the economics of being a day laborer. Waiting on the corner, as the sort of landmark article goes, the Bronx slave Market. Waiting on the corner, waiting to be picked up by a rich woman, white woman of the house, to work for a day, or maybe for a week, and maybe get fired. So that kind of indeterminacy of where your money is going to come from, first of all, but then also the just backbreaking labor of mopping floors, changing sheets, endless laundry. All of these things come together. And then the vulnerability to possible sexual assault by the man of the house. All these things are really being explored by journalists, black women journalists, to kind of make sure that there's a kind of prismatic approach to thinking about the role of black people and the role of black women in particular. And so that painting, you can see her with a broom, standing against the doorway, doorway in a blue room. And so I think that the hue of the blue kind of brings in that kind of blues aesthetic, perhaps, but also kind of edifying. That woman, she is seen slightly from below, looking up, she looks almost monumental. And her implements of work, her broom, become kind of like a staff. She is just so ennobled, even within the context of domestic labor.
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Alison Stewart
I want to ask about something, Kathy. I'm sort of curious. There's a sculpture called Tired, and it's a terracotta woman. She's seated. She kind of looks like she's had it. Her hands are clasped. I'm sort of interested as a curator. What do you make of the terracotta material?
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Catherine Morris
That's such a good question. The terracotta, which is a pliable form of clay, is very malleable and moldable in multiple ways. And Catlett uses it and returns to it throughout her career with different impulses and from different points of inspiration, I would say, both materially and in terms of subject. Tired, which is a work that is absolutely a masterpiece from Howard University's collection, is the sculptural equivalent, in many ways, of what Delilah just described. It is a heroic. It is a modestly scaled yet heroically represented woman seated in a moment of. It feels like interiority, a moment of tiredness, a moment of exhaustion. The angle of the neck and the play of the shoulders just tell you that immediately in relationship to what Dalila has just described in terms of domestic labor and the politics of it. Even the title of the work is appointedly, though subtly made distinction about who this woman is and what her life looks like. And at the same time, Catlett is presenting her in a heroic way through a traditional sculptural medium and giving value and space, literally, in the context of fine art making, to the lived experience of this black woman.
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Alison Stewart
We're talking about Elizabeth Catlett, a black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies. It's on display at the Brooklyn Museum. I'm speaking with Kathryn Morris of the Brooklyn Museum and Delilah Scroggs of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Okay, Delilah, I'm gonna let you say it because you say it much better than I can. She became a member of the tgp you described a little bit at the time of the interview. Can you describe what it. What. What the TB TGP was, why she was drawn to it? What skills did she have that helped the tgp?
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Yes, I. I'll try to say it properly. The popular. The TGP was an incredible artist collective, as I said before, to give life to the way I imagine it was. For one thing, they met on Friday afternoons for collective critiques where they would show each other their work. They would get feedback. Oh, you could redraw your Hand better this way to get the foreshortening or the message is not clear enough, you need to rework this or that. So there was a kind of really collective ethos. And that was really key to the ways that they were able to. If they were going to serve the people, they had to work as a people. The other thing that happened on Fridays was unions, protest organizations, activists, student groups. These are all organizations that would come to the TGP and request that the artists make work on behalf of their issues. So they are producing pamphlets, flyers, the kind of material that was meant to operate in the world as activist material. In addition to these, the. The kind of work that was directly towards protests, they created portfolios of artworks. And they were all driven by the kind of continuing ethos of the Mexican Revolution. So the idea that throwing off the influence of Spain, throwing off trying to critique the role of the oligarchy that has controlled land and really invested in addressing the issues of the working class, the disposition, the dispossessed indigenous people and centering those needs to and as well as anti fascism, to really create a new way of thinking about the world that was anti racist, anti fascist and really focused on the people.
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Alison Stewart
This is a place where her life gets interesting. It's all interesting. But Catlett was blacklisted because of her associations and not entertaining able to enter the US did her art, Catherine, did her art reflect her being essentially banished from her home country? She became a Mexican citizen, by the way.
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Catherine Morris
The. The inability to get a visa absolutely happened after her decision to become a Mexican citizen. She had been married and had three sons who were Mexican. She saw herself as Mexican, as both Mexican and American. And I forgot your question.
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Alison Stewart
I was wondering if her article, if her art reflected her being banished from the country of her birth.
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Catherine Morris
Thank you for that. I would say that her art reflects in this period into the 1970s, reflects her active and consistent attempts to remain engaged with what was going on in the United States, if from a distance and if through media like newspaper and radio and visits from friends and activists and artists to Mexico to see her. She very much understood herself as part of the political activities that were happening in the United States, even if she was not able to get there personally for that or to see her own family. So I would say that she made a clear and concerted effort to remain part of those conversations. And much of the work from this period, I think, reflects her passionate commitment to the younger generation of activists that she saw coming up that she wanted to give voice to and build a platform for through her own work.
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Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
As you go. Excuse me, Delilah. As you go through the. The exhibit, it seems like you got your art from all different locations. Could you share some of the locations, the places where you got art Catlett art from?
- [25:39]
Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
Oh, sure. I'll start with HBCUs. As Katherine already mentioned, Tyre came from Howard University. We would not be able to do this exhibition without the role, without HBCUs in their collections. And that has everything to do with the fact that the mainstream white art world had not invested in and respected black art when Cat lid was making her early work. And places like Howard University, Hampton University, which has, I believe, one of the largest holdings of her prints in a public collection. Clark Atlanta University, which early on gave awards to black artists through the Atlanta annual for their work. These are all institutions that have preserved Catlett's legacy and had the foresight to understand the value of it back in the 40s, the 50s and onwards. So that's, I think, a key place where the work on view comes from. Through the work of our colleague Mary Lee Corlett, we were able to get, you know, some really incredible work from Mexico as well. The academia there, which hasn't has the TGP collection now and many works, many prints come from that. And then we just had so many institutional lenders. I can't even. I feel like I would probably give anyone short shrift to go through and name them all. But we were very lucky to have so many museums agree to lend to this exhibition. And we're really thankful.
- [27:13]
Alison Stewart
Everybody should go see it. Elizabeth Catlett, a black revolutionary artist and all that it implies. It's on view through January 19, 2025. My guests have been Delilah Scruggs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Catherine Morris from the Brooklyn Museum. Thank you so much for being with us.
- [27:29]
Catherine Morris
Thank you.
- [27:35]
Bic Soleil Razor Advertiser
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Let's go.
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Alison Stewart
Huge fan.
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Catherine Morris
I'm always honored to meet fans out in the wild.
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Alison Stewart
Wild.
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Catherine Morris
Well, the Geico app is top notch.
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Catherine Morris
Sign what? The app. Yeah, sure.
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Alison Stewart
Anything to help, I suppose.
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Catherine Morris
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