Elizabeth Catlett, a sculptor and printmaker born in 1915, Washington DC, died last month in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

In 1935, after graduating from Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing, she became a school teacher in Durham, North Carolina for two years

before pursuing an MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History.

She began to focus on subjects she knew best, black women. She won first price in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940 with her piece Mother and Child carved in limestone. After graduating, she lived in New Orleans and taught at Dillard University. On a break from her work, she met the artist Charles White in Chicago. They married in 1941 and divorced 5 years later. She studied ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1940 and lithography at the Art Students Ligue in New York in 42-43. She left New Orleans for New York City in 43, her style became more abstract under the influence of Ossip Zadkine.

In 1946, she traveled to Mexico on a fellowship, met and married the artist Franscisco Mora. She worked at the Taller de Grafica Popular, a workshop in Mexico City for murals and graphic arts.
She was arrested in 1946 in Mexico City during a strike by Mexican railroad workers. Suspected to have ties with the Communist party, she was later declared undesirable in the United States by the State Department. She became a Mexican citizen. The first female professor of sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's School of Fine Art in Mexico City, she became head of the department. She retired in Cuernavaca in 1975.

The art of Catlett is a blend of figurative, cubism and semi-abstract and the artist stated: " I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful". Social justice was her goal through art and class struggle, from African American and later Mexican workers, is a recurrent theme in her works.

Two of her sculptures can be seen in Armstrong Park in New Orleans (Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson)