Brooks Museum Curatorial Fellow Heather Nickels will join the Hooks Institute to look at the recent exhibit, Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett sought to iconize and inspire oppressed populations in the US and her adopted home of Mexico through her sculptures and lithograph prints.
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will feature the internationally renowned work of African American artist Elizabeth Catlett.
Brooks Museum Curatorial Fellow Heather Nickels will examine pieces featured in the recent exhibit, “Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett.”
Catlett wanted her art to be accessible to all, regardless of education or experience, which, according to her 2021 obituary in the New York Times, "meant balancing abstraction with figuration." Her stylized faces and bodies are proud and stoic, yet curvaceous and soft, designed to "show man's dignity stripped to essence." An educator as well as artist, Ms. Catlett went on to become the first female professor of sculpture and, eventually, head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Catlett states that she "learned how to use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful."
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