Elizabeth Catlett

The richly illustrated re-discovery of a great artist who was among the first to create images and sculptures of African-American life and history to close a gap in the canon of art history.

If images do not exist, one must create them. At the start of the twentieth century, there were certain absences in the way that African American history was represented in the canon of art history. Some collective experiences lacked images with which people could identify, which were necessary for the idea of community and a shared iconography to emerge. These images - clear, precise and invariably personal portraits of people close to her and heroines such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley, or showing events from African American history - were created by the American Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett.