The Insurgent Art of Elizabeth Catlett

In May 1970, the defiant gust of Elizabeth Catlett’s voice swept from Mexico to Evanston, Illinois: ‘For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies!’, she declared to those gathered at Northwestern University for the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art. As opposed to addressing the crowd directly, she delivered her rousing speech over the phone. Having been labelled an ‘undesirable alien’ by the US government, in part due to her collaboration with Taller de Gráfica Popular (a Mexican printmaking collective), she was prohibited from re-entering the country of her birth. Fifty-five years after they were first uttered, the zephyr of Catlett’s remarks continues to reverberate at the Art Institute of Chicago, where her retrospective ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’ is on view.

The fluctuation of her address across tenses implies that one becomes a revolutionary and must work to remain so: a practice of perpetual re-radicalization, to which Catlett was unerringly committed. For the artist, being a revolutionary meant embodying ‘a threat to the well-being of the United States of America’, an ‘honor’ she hoped to ‘have earned’. As her proclamation breezes through tenses and, thus, through time, it rhymes with writer June Jordan’s poem ‘I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies’ (1976) – which, like Catlett’s remark, alludes to a revolutionary positioning as something one aspires to and grows towards. The exhibition prompts sustained inquiry around how – in chorus with Jordan’s gale of a text – we may ‘become a menace to our enemies’ and earn the honour to name ourselves as such again and again.

Woven throughout the exhibition are emblems of Catlett’s relationships with Black women writers, through which she sharpened her revolutionary ideals. As noted in the chronology printed along the walls, upon moving to Chicago in 1941 she lived with Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, who founded the South Side Community Art Center that year. During that period she also formed a bond with poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who bears a striking resemblance to a figure in Special Houses (1946/89), a linocut from Catlett’s print series ‘The Black Woman’ (1946–47). The 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley also features in the series and reappears later, serene and contemplative, in an eponymous 1973 bust sculpted by Catlett at the behest of Margaret Walker, who organized the inaugural Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. Present at the gathering were Jordan as well as Sonia Sanchez, who two years before Catlett’s death in 2012 wrote the poem ‘6 Haiku’ in her honour, its opening verses reading: ‘La Señora / making us remember / flesh and wind / O how you / help us catch / each other’s breath’. In giving material form to her relationships with these writers, Catlett heralds them as insurgent oracles and affirms co-conspiratorship among Black women as an immutable agent of political transformation. 

Catlett’s embodiment of the ‘revolutionary’ lies too in her dedication to placing work in locales where the majesty of Black social life unspools. In the pamphlet for her 1989 exhibition at the Jamaica Arts Center, New York, she advocated for inclusion in both ‘mainstream’ spaces and ‘small black cultural centers […] where we improvise galleries’. The latter is exemplified by Floating Family (1995–96), commissioned by Hamza Walker to be installed over the circulation desk at the Chicago Public Library’s Legler Branch, located in the city’s West Side, where Catlett was elated about the prospect of ‘Black people sitting in that building, reading.’ Depicting a mother and daughter levitating in mid-air, their fingers, much like their fates, are intertwined, thereby amplifying the exhibition’s clarion call around interdependence as a means of both becoming and remaining ‘a menace to [our] enemies’.

Elizabeth Catlett’s ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’ is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until 4 January 2026

^{Main image: Elizabeth Catlett, ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago}