Catlett Comes To NC Central

Any artist who hopes to create immortal works that become part of the elusive, intransigent canon must combine their virtuosity with the ability to reflect a sense of his or her own time. Austen and Joyce did it, as did Beethoven, Picasso, Walker Evans.... The short list continues, but one common denominator was that each rode the zeitgeist like a zephyr into immortality.

In viewing the large Elizabeth Catlett retrospective now on display at the North Carolina Central University Museum of Art, one is struck not simply by the excellence of the works, but by the felt presence of their maker and the important history lesson imparted-a visual vocabulary in which we can discuss America's past of racial inequality and struggle.

The show marks a homecoming for Catlett, in that she taught art at Durham's Hillside High School for several years in the 1930s before leaving for the University of Iowa. There she studied with Grant Wood, who encouraged her to create work about the people she knew.

Elizabeth Catlett: Master Printmaker follows Catlett's career from 1946 to the near present in over 70 prints from the Moore Energy Resources Collection. In the 1940s she created quietly powerful images of black men and women struggling in an unjust society. "A Special Fear For My Loved Ones" presents the body of a lynched black man surrounded by the feet of other men above him. It's a strong example of Catlett's use of the dynamic symmetry marking much of her work, and the image recurs over 40 years later in 1992's To Marry, which features a just-married couple embracing, juxtaposed above the "Special Fear" image. The effect is stunning.

As general bookends to the show, these pieces encase a significant and colorful timeline of the civil rights movement, with Catlett's prints depicting everything from the force of Malcolm X, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers, to the soulful and steadfast care of black mothers and the then-nascent black feminist movement.

As Kenneth Rodgers, director of the NCCU museum, writes in his opening catalog essay, "[Catlett] used printmaking as a medium for reflecting on and transforming social justice. The audience, whether... black or white, male or female, always mattered." Catlett's ability to look through her canvases and into the viewer without compromising her work is exactly why we will be seeing and knowing her work centuries from now.