In a career spanning more than 70 years, Elizabeth Catlett created sculptures and prints that celebrate the heroic strength and endurance of African American working-class women. The subject of this sculpture is Glory Van Scott, a Chicago dancer, actress, author, educator, and civic activist born in 1947. Catlett met her at a conference on African American women across generations and art disciplines. Catlett’s bronze bust of Glory is one of the Muskegon Museum of Art’s most iconic works.
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Catlett’s father died before her birth and she was raised by her single mother. An artist in high school, she was admitted to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, but was denied entry when the school learned of her race. She instead attended Howard University, graduating cum laude in 1937. After teaching art at Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, Catlett enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Iowa to study with Grant Wood. Wood taught students to "paint what you know best." Catlett heeded his advice and focused on the heritage and experiences of African American women. She graduated in 1940, the first of three students to complete the program, and the first African American woman.
Catlett took a position at Dillard University in New Orleans and spent her summers in Chicago, studying ceramics and lithography. She met and married Charles White and the two moved to New York City in 1942. Catlett taught adult education courses, studied printmaking at the Art Students League, and took sculpture lessons from Cubist artist Ossip Zadkine. A Rosenwald Fund Fellowship took her to Mexico in 1946, and in 1947 she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the famed workshop dedicated to leftist activism. Divorced from White in 1946, Catlett married Francsico Mora in 1947 and had three children with him. She studied and associated with major Mexican artists, including Francisco Zúñiga, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Catlett’s involvement with leftist and Communist causes brought scrutiny from the U.S. Embassy and she was declared an “undesirable alien” in 1949. She renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1962 (regaining it in 2002). Despite her inability to travel to the U.S., her work became highly popular in the 1960s and 70s, and was seen at institutions around the country. By the time of her death, she was the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, and was collected by such prestigious institutions as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, among many others around the world.