Since the mid-1940s, American-born Elizabeth Catlett has worked as a graphic artist, sculptor, and teacher. Together with her husband, painter and graphic artist Francisco Mora, she has also raised a family in Mexico. Her sculptures in the United States and Mexico include monumental public sculpture, wall reliefs, busts, aerial and standing figures, and studio works of busts, torsos, reclining and standing figures. At present she divides her time between Cuernavaca, Mexico and New York City, working on sculptures and prints, receiving collectors, fellow artists, and visitors from around the world, and enjoying an extended family of grandchildren, relatives, and friends.

She has received top honors and commissions in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. A large portion of her sculptural Ïuvre is now on exhibit in "Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty Year Retrospective." The show opened at The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, New York in January 1998 and will travel through 1999 to Blaffer Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, and Spelman College Museum of Art, Atlanta. Twenty of the 60 works are from private collections, shown publicly for the first time.

Elizabeth Catlett's themes include the mother and child, suffering due to racial injustice, the bodily and facial beauty of African Americans, especially of the African-American woman, social and/or political protest, love, dignity, and an essential human vitality. Catlett is the first sculptor to represent the African-American woman in the full range of her humanity. She is depicted as simply herself, with a natural nobility and dignity, as a mother, a social or political protester, a loving wife, and in moods that reveal her as tired, penetrating, or calm in thought, speaking out angrily against injustice, or singing with joy. Other subjects include African-American, South American, and Native American figures of all ages. READ MORE ABOUT CATLETT