Renowned Sculptor and Printmaker Elizabeth Catlett Was a Member of Delta Sigma Theta

Did you know that acclaimed sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.? Catlett was initiated through the Alpha Chapter at Howard University, the sorority’s founding chapter.

Alice Elizabeth Catlett was born on April 15, 1915, in Washington, D.C., the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. After the Carnegie Institute of Technology rescinded her admission because of her race, she enrolled at Howard University, where she studied under artists like Loïs Mailou Jones and James Porter and graduated cum laude in 1935. She went on to the University of Iowa, where she studied with the painter Grant Wood and, in 1940, became the first person to earn a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the school.

Catlett devoted her art to the dignity, strength, and struggles of Black women and working-class people. Her graduate thesis sculpture, “Negro Mother and Child,” won first prize at the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, and her landmark series “The Negro Woman” honored figures like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Phillis Wheatley. Working in bronze, wood, stone, terracotta, and print, she created some of the most enduring images of Black life in twentieth-century art.

In 1946, a Rosenwald Fellowship took Catlett to Mexico City, where she joined the renowned printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular and married the Mexican artist Francisco Mora. She made Mexico her home for the rest of her life, eventually becoming the first woman to head the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Because of her outspoken activism, the U.S. government once labeled her an “undesirable alien,” and she became a Mexican citizen in 1962.

Catlett never stopped creating, producing public monuments like the bronze statue of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans and “Students Aspire” at her alma mater, Howard University, and working into her nineties. She died on April 2, 2012, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the age of 96. In 2024, the National Gallery of Art honored her with a major retrospective, “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist.” Her life’s work reflects the scholarship, service, and commitment to community at the heart of Delta Sigma Theta.

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