The granddaughter of slaves and daughter of a college professor, (Alice) Elizabeth Catlett grew up in a household that placed great value on education. She received a B.A. in art from Howard University in 1936, and then taught high school for two years before coming to The University of Iowa for graduate school to study under Grant Wood.

Since the residence halls were several years away from integration, Catlett rented rooms with local African American families during her stay in Iowa City, and also spent a year in the Iowa Federation Home. In a 2003 interview for the UI’s alumni magazine, she remembered her surprise at the mixture of openness and discrimination present at Iowa — a contrast to the more straightforward segration of her Washington D.C. upbringing: “I’d lived in an African American culture my whole life. In Iowa City, I suddenly was living among white people, but I still couldn’t do things like live in the dorms.”

Catlett expressed no such ambivalence when recalling her classes with Grant Wood: “[He] was a very generous teacher and he influenced all my work. He would tell his students, ‘Paint what you know.'” This advice helped her to develop her signature social realism style, featuring images drawn from African American culture and experience. Upon graduating with The University’s first M.F.A. in sculpture, Catlett’s thesis work included the stone carving Mother and Child, which won top prize in Chicago’s 1940 American Negro Exposition — only the first of many awards in Catlett’s long and distinguished career.

In October 2007, The University of Iowa Museum of Art opened the exhibit “I Am: Prints by Elizabeth Catlett,” featuring 27 newly acquired prints. The artist donated their purchase price to the UI Foundation to establish the Elizabeth Catlett Mora Scholarship Fund, which benefits printmaking students who are African American or Latino.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services