# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BoRm_jWhmRN
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16045554-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/legacy-do/65fe1385074a37e27ed4845c9d8a60412fe08f67b2b6a688238b5b470a48451a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2018-09-28T15:39:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction
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“I have always wanted my art to service my people—to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”
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Elizabeth Catlett (1915 - 2012) was an African-American artist that worked primarily in printmaking and sculpture to express social and political concerns surrounding the African-American experience in America. Catlett said that she created art to "present black people in their beauty and dignity for ourselves and others to understand and enjoy." After receiving a fellowship to the famous El Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop) in Mexico City, Catlett continued to travel between the two countries throughout her life, which greatly informed her socially engaged style of printmaking. Following in the tradition of Mexican public art, Catlett used the printmaking techniques of woodprint, lithography, screenprint, and linoleum cut, to create prints about social and political causes including the Civil Rights movement. “Art for me must develop from a necessity within my people,” she explained. “It must answer a question, or wake somebody up, or give a shove in the right direction — our liberation.” Catlett’s sculptures and prints are influenced by pre-Columbian figuration and modernist abstraction, and mostly feature black women. Through the democratic medium of printmaking, which allowed for the cheap distribution of images, Catlett represented black women multidimensionally: as mothers, activists, and laborers. “After I decided to be an artist,” Catlett said, “the first thing I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity." #ElizabethCatlett 
Image: Courtesy of Burning in Water Gallery, 1948.

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## Tags

artistinaction, elizabethcatlett

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