Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago
Elizabeth Catlett first traveled to Mexico in 1946. When she decided to move there permanently, she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico’s most politically active artists’ collective, and eventually became the first woman professor of sculpture at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
The prints Catlett made after her move to Mexico illuminate the terrain of African American women’s identity and the realities of Mexican people’s lives, finding intersections between the movements for civil rights and self-determination for African Americans and people throughout Latin America as well as shared experiences for women of color across political and cultural divides. Her sculptures, which most often depict figures of women on scales both intimate and monumental, engage form to convey her deep empathy for these same subjects.
Hear from Melanie Herzog, a foremost scholar of Catlett’s work, and explore the ways in which, over the course of more than half a century in Mexico, Catlett developed a praxis of printmaking as a democratizing medium, embraced the expressive potential of sculptural form, and sustained her commitment to the African American and Mexican audiences she termed “both my peoples.”
This lecture is made possible by the Frank J. Mooney Memorial Fund.
Elizabeth Catlett first traveled to Mexico in 1946. When she decided to move there permanently, she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico’s most politically active artists’ collective, and eventually became the first woman professor of sculpture at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
The prints Catlett made after her move to Mexico illuminate the terrain of African American women’s identity and the realities of Mexican people’s lives, finding intersections between the movements for civil rights and self-determination for African Americans and people throughout Latin America as well as shared experiences for women of color across political and cultural divides. Her sculptures, which most often depict figures of women on scales both intimate and monumental, engage form to convey her deep empathy for these same subjects.
Hear from Melanie Herzog, a foremost scholar of Catlett’s work, and explore the ways in which, over the course of more than half a century in Mexico, Catlett developed a praxis of printmaking as a democratizing medium, embraced the expressive potential of sculptural form, and sustained her commitment to the African American and Mexican audiences she termed “both my peoples.”
This lecture is made possible by the Frank J. Mooney Memorial Fund.
