Colorful walls, bold texts, a blue arch structure that invites you deeper into the space, and works from printmakers of South Side’s past and contemporary. On the outside of the gallery, a bright strip featuring selected images of the exhibition wrapped around like a Christmas ribbon.
As we walk through the gallery space inside, we traverse from the South Side community’s past to the present, with printmaking as the vessel. Partial public archive, partial private journal, “Of Her Becoming: Elizabeth Catlett’s Legacy in Chicago” is a beautiful investigation into one of the most revolutionary eras in Catlett’s artistic journey and a look into how contemporary South Side artists continue to build on the legacy of black womanhood and black queerness.
Catlett’s time in Chicago’s South Side was her coming-of-age as an artist. After receiving her MFA from the University of Iowa. Catlett moved to Chicago in the summer of 1941 to continue her education at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying ceramics while advancing her lithography practice at the South Side Community Art Center. During that year, Catlett witnessed first-hand and participated in the peak of the Chicago Renaissance, where black visual artists, writers, and performers actively engaged the community and used their art to express their progressive and radical politics, asserting power for themselves and the black community. These creative pioneers significantly catalyzed Catlett’s leftist political beliefs. Eventually, Catlett forged powerful, lasting relationships with the powerful black artist community around the new South Side Community Art Center, including her first husband, Charles White, whom she would marry that December. It is safe to say that the one year Catlett spent in Chicago shaped her future practices. It showed Catlett what her heart was drawn toward and whose voices she wanted to amplify with her creations.
Exhibition documentation by Anjali Pinto
Walking through Arts Incubator’s doors, the space is segmented into two halves with a blue archway. On the left, facing the front entrance, are Catlett’s pieces, hung in salon style on a bright, yellow wall. The intimate layout allows the pieces to build a rhetoric of black female identity as if the figures in Catlett’s lithographs are conversing with each other. If you follow the direction each character is looking toward, it will take you around the clock through each piece on the wall. And quickly, we begin to notice a few core themes: The civil rights movement, liberation, African American ancestry, and the one that struck me the most — black motherhood.
Sitting at the top left corner, Madonna (1982) recreates the iconic image of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus in the form of a Black mother embracing her two black daughters. Ironically, William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted L’Innocence a year later, using almost the same composition with the white Virgin Mary holding the baby and a lamb. Completely unrelated, both pieces are rare renditions of the Virgin cradling more than the infant alone. Catlett’s piece is ridden with distress, rigidness, and uncertainty. Her chiseled, sculpture-like characters have vigilant eyes and are hurdling together out of obvious fear and discomfort toward the outside world. In the meantime, Bouguereau’s piece was soft, bright, and peaceful. The baby is in his sweet dreams. The lamb is cute and innocent. Mary is flawless and holy. There is not a single trace of distraught and danger. May God bless them.
Exhibition documentation by Anjali Pinto
Directly beneath Madonna sits The Torture of Mothers (1970), a small lithograph of a black woman in domestic cooking attire. She clenches her fists, looking sternly to the right: the kind of look and posture you only see on a mother who’d just received unexpected and undesired news. So you wonder: what happened? Are they hurt? Arrested? Or worse… murdered? Are they in trouble, and if so, what kind? When will they be coming home? Black motherhood is haunted with rage and concern. This brave, resilient woman does whatever she can for her household. She stands stiff and straight, carrying all the silent weight on her shoulders.
As the exhibition progresses, we walk across the blue archways to enter the modern days as we transition through physical spaces. The second half of the exhibit, titled The Journey, showcases works from three contemporary South Side women artists whose practices are deeply rooted in printmaking: mixed-media painter and letterpress printmaker Angela Davis Fegan, writer, performer, and visual artist Krista Franklin, and poet, multidisciplinary artist, and cultural worker Rebel Betty.
The contemporary pieces are drastically different from Catlett’s work visually. In Catlett’s legacy, we see conventional printmaking, such as block printing and lithography. Brown, grey, and black take predominance, complemented by darker shades of red, orange, yellow, and green.
If Catlett’s pieces looked like they belonged in old newspapers or traditional art publications, the contemporary artists look like they belonged in the streets, living and breathing with the South Side community whose very experience their work captures and depicts.
Exhibition documentation by Natasha Moustache
For example, Fegan’s letterpress work is often combined with layers of shapes, symbols, and graphics, forcing the audience to get up close to read the messages printed. Even then, sometimes the message may still not be legible enough due to overlapping images and intentional choices of using similar colors on the letters and the background. At times, the letters and phrases are used as paint strokes to form a rich and abstract texture made with words, messages, and declarations. This, in a sense, resembles the black, especially the black queer identity. Neither queerness nor blackness can be clearly and easily labeled. Rather, it is embodied by each individual’s experience and existence.
Betty’s mixed media work was another highlight in The Journey. Her work explores the intersection between painting, collaging, pattern making, and archival practices, drawing inspiration from the artist’s afro, indigenous, and Puerto Rican heritages. Both of Betty’s pieces were created specifically for the exhibition as a tribute, and Catlett’s past news clips were used as background and building blocks. First time participating in an exhibition after three years, Betty shared with us her own interpretation of Elizabeth Catlett’s becoming, constructing a conversation between herself and her pioneer.
Perhaps that’s why the contemporary portion of the exhibition is titled The Journey. In Catlett’s pieces, we see perfected technique and accurate execution. But in the contemporary pieces, we see fearless adoptions of bright, pastel, and neon palettes, bold exploration transcending beyond traditional printmaking techniques, and audacious incorporation of unexpected materials. Catlett’s existence was developed and mature, whereas the practices of the younger generations of Chicago’s South Side are works in progress. One after another, they will complete their coming-of-age ritual through their artistic expressions and eventually “become” someone and something. At the end of their lifetime, they can then look back and see the exact path of their “becoming.” Whatever they evolve into will be a crucial part of the grander legacy of black women and queer people. And the journey continues as each future generation inherits from their predecessors. Around another wall or through another archway. It is still only the beginning.
Colorful walls, bold texts, a blue arch structure that invites you deeper into the space, and works from printmakers of South Side’s past and contemporary. On the outside of the gallery, a bright strip featuring selected images of the exhibition wrapped around like a Christmas ribbon.
As we walk through the gallery space inside, we traverse from the South Side community’s past to the present, with printmaking as the vessel. Partial public archive, partial private journal, “Of Her Becoming: Elizabeth Catlett’s Legacy in Chicago” is a beautiful investigation into one of the most revolutionary eras in Catlett’s artistic journey and a look into how contemporary South Side artists continue to build on the legacy of black womanhood and black queerness.
Catlett’s time in Chicago’s South Side was her coming-of-age as an artist. After receiving her MFA from the University of Iowa. Catlett moved to Chicago in the summer of 1941 to continue her education at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying ceramics while advancing her lithography practice at the South Side Community Art Center. During that year, Catlett witnessed first-hand and participated in the peak of the Chicago Renaissance, where black visual artists, writers, and performers actively engaged the community and used their art to express their progressive and radical politics, asserting power for themselves and the black community. These creative pioneers significantly catalyzed Catlett’s leftist political beliefs. Eventually, Catlett forged powerful, lasting relationships with the powerful black artist community around the new South Side Community Art Center, including her first husband, Charles White, whom she would marry that December. It is safe to say that the one year Catlett spent in Chicago shaped her future practices. It showed Catlett what her heart was drawn toward and whose voices she wanted to amplify with her creations.
Exhibition documentation by Anjali Pinto
Walking through Arts Incubator’s doors, the space is segmented into two halves with a blue archway. On the left, facing the front entrance, are Catlett’s pieces, hung in salon style on a bright, yellow wall. The intimate layout allows the pieces to build a rhetoric of black female identity as if the figures in Catlett’s lithographs are conversing with each other. If you follow the direction each character is looking toward, it will take you around the clock through each piece on the wall. And quickly, we begin to notice a few core themes: The civil rights movement, liberation, African American ancestry, and the one that struck me the most — black motherhood.
Sitting at the top left corner, Madonna (1982) recreates the iconic image of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus in the form of a Black mother embracing her two black daughters. Ironically, William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted L’Innocence a year later, using almost the same composition with the white Virgin Mary holding the baby and a lamb. Completely unrelated, both pieces are rare renditions of the Virgin cradling more than the infant alone. Catlett’s piece is ridden with distress, rigidness, and uncertainty. Her chiseled, sculpture-like characters have vigilant eyes and are hurdling together out of obvious fear and discomfort toward the outside world. In the meantime, Bouguereau’s piece was soft, bright, and peaceful. The baby is in his sweet dreams. The lamb is cute and innocent. Mary is flawless and holy. There is not a single trace of distraught and danger. May God bless them.
Exhibition documentation by Anjali Pinto
Directly beneath Madonna sits The Torture of Mothers (1970), a small lithograph of a black woman in domestic cooking attire. She clenches her fists, looking sternly to the right: the kind of look and posture you only see on a mother who’d just received unexpected and undesired news. So you wonder: what happened? Are they hurt? Arrested? Or worse… murdered? Are they in trouble, and if so, what kind? When will they be coming home? Black motherhood is haunted with rage and concern. This brave, resilient woman does whatever she can for her household. She stands stiff and straight, carrying all the silent weight on her shoulders.
As the exhibition progresses, we walk across the blue archways to enter the modern days as we transition through physical spaces. The second half of the exhibit, titled The Journey, showcases works from three contemporary South Side women artists whose practices are deeply rooted in printmaking: mixed-media painter and letterpress printmaker Angela Davis Fegan, writer, performer, and visual artist Krista Franklin, and poet, multidisciplinary artist, and cultural worker Rebel Betty.
The contemporary pieces are drastically different from Catlett’s work visually. In Catlett’s legacy, we see conventional printmaking, such as block printing and lithography. Brown, grey, and black take predominance, complemented by darker shades of red, orange, yellow, and green.
If Catlett’s pieces looked like they belonged in old newspapers or traditional art publications, the contemporary artists look like they belonged in the streets, living and breathing with the South Side community whose very experience their work captures and depicts.
Exhibition documentation by Natasha Moustache
For example, Fegan’s letterpress work is often combined with layers of shapes, symbols, and graphics, forcing the audience to get up close to read the messages printed. Even then, sometimes the message may still not be legible enough due to overlapping images and intentional choices of using similar colors on the letters and the background. At times, the letters and phrases are used as paint strokes to form a rich and abstract texture made with words, messages, and declarations. This, in a sense, resembles the black, especially the black queer identity. Neither queerness nor blackness can be clearly and easily labeled. Rather, it is embodied by each individual’s experience and existence.
Betty’s mixed media work was another highlight in The Journey. Her work explores the intersection between painting, collaging, pattern making, and archival practices, drawing inspiration from the artist’s afro, indigenous, and Puerto Rican heritages. Both of Betty’s pieces were created specifically for the exhibition as a tribute, and Catlett’s past news clips were used as background and building blocks. First time participating in an exhibition after three years, Betty shared with us her own interpretation of Elizabeth Catlett’s becoming, constructing a conversation between herself and her pioneer.
Perhaps that’s why the contemporary portion of the exhibition is titled The Journey. In Catlett’s pieces, we see perfected technique and accurate execution. But in the contemporary pieces, we see fearless adoptions of bright, pastel, and neon palettes, bold exploration transcending beyond traditional printmaking techniques, and audacious incorporation of unexpected materials. Catlett’s existence was developed and mature, whereas the practices of the younger generations of Chicago’s South Side are works in progress. One after another, they will complete their coming-of-age ritual through their artistic expressions and eventually “become” someone and something. At the end of their lifetime, they can then look back and see the exact path of their “becoming.” Whatever they evolve into will be a crucial part of the grander legacy of black women and queer people. And the journey continues as each future generation inherits from their predecessors. Around another wall or through another archway. It is still only the beginning.