Artinfo reports the news that Elizabeth Catlett has died:
She died at her home in Cuernavaca, 40 miles south of Mexico City, where she had lived since using a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to travel to Mexico in 1946. After studying with the sculptors Jose L. Ruiz and Francisco Zúñiga, she eventually married the late Mexican painter Francisco Mora, and became a Mexican citizen soon after the U.S. Embassy asked her to provide the names of Communists she knew in 1955. She is included in the National Museum of Art in Mexico City.
Catlett was born in Washington D.C. in 1915 to parents who were both teachers — though her father died before she was born. She earned her Bachelor of Science in art at Howard University — she was originally offered a full scholarship to Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Carnegie Mellon University, though she was denied enrollment when the institution discovered she was black — and later received an MFA from the University of Iowa, where “American Gothic” painter Grant Wood was her mentor.
Elizabeth Catlett, African-American Printmaker and Sculptor, Dead at 96 (Artinfo.com)
