Lecture: “My Two Peoples”—Elizabeth Catlett’s Activism in Mexico
@ The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
Opening Thursday, November 13th, from 6PM - 7PM
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.
Join Melanie Herzog, a foremost scholar of Catlett’s work, to 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.
About the Speaker
Melanie Herzog is professor emerita of Art History at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received an M.F.A. in ceramics and a Ph.D. in art history. With an emphasis on artists’ encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and representation, she teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on art and visual culture of North America and the African diaspora. Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000) and numerous essays, most recently “‘Thinking About Women’: Form, Substance, and Radical Politics,” in the companion publication for the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Black Artist and All That It Implies, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
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