Carved with precision and elegance, Elizabeth Catlett’s Mask and Face, both of 1973, exemplify her commitment to the expressive potential of form and her profound understanding of the physical properties of her materials. Over the course of her long career in the United States and Mexico, Catlett’s sculptural practice spanned a range of approaches, from figuration to abstraction.1 Face, carved in marble and polished to a high sheen, is an elegantly mask-like rendition of human physiognomy, while Mask, carved in mahogany and sanded smooth, is one of Catlett’s most abstract sculptures.

Born in 1915 in Washington, DC, Elizabeth Catlett studied at Howard University (1931- 1935), where she was exposed to African art, European and American modernisms, and current debates about the sources to which African American artists should look for artistic inspiration. In 1940, Catlett earned the first Master of Fine Arts degree awarded in sculpture at the University of Iowa. She subsequently taught at Dillard University in New Orleans, then moved to New York City, where she taught at a night school for workers in Harlem and began to explore sculptural abstraction. After spending several months in Mexico in 1946, Catlett moved there permanently the following year; she lived and worked in Mexico until her death in 2012. She was hired as the first woman professor of sculpture at Mexico’s National Autonomous University in 1958, and, despite challenges to her qualifications by her male colleagues, she taught sculpture and served as Chair of the sculpture program for nearly thirty years.

Catlett’s approach to sculpture was informed by African and Pre-Encounter Mexican sources and by modernist abstraction – which, she consistently pointed out, has roots in African sculpture. The abstraction of African figural forms, carved in wood, was a primary influence for her. Catlett wrote of her attraction to African sculpture, “I am impressed by the use of form to express emotion . . . the variety is unending. All African art interests me. I see such force, such life!”2 In Face, the sharply defined edges and angular planes juxtaposed with subtle curves are characteristic of her ongoing investigation of form. While the sculpture’s physiognomy resembles the facial features of Tadep sculptures carved by the Mabmila peoples of Cameroon and Nigeria, Catlett did not replicate the sculptural forms of any particular African cultural lineage.3 More important to her than the invocation of any specific sculptural tradition was how meaning is expressed through form, and she sought to achieve, throughout her career, “form that would achieve sympathy.”4

Catlett relished the tactile materiality as well as the visual qualities of her sculptural mediums. She said, “When I carve, I am guided by the beauty and the configuration of the material. When I use wood, for example, I might exaggerate the form to bring out a little more of the grain of the wood. I like to finish sculpture to the maximum beauty attainable from the material from which it is created.”5 When she worked in stone, such as limestone, onyx, and the black marble in which she carved Face, she chose finishes that highlight the roughness, sheen, or translucency of these materials. In her wood carvings, such as Mask, she carved and sanded her forms to emphasize the patterns inherent to the grain of the woods selected for these sculptures.

Curious about the resonance of forms and images when carved or modeled in different materials, she often investigated the same motif in multiple mediums. A mahogany Face that Catlett also carved in 1973 is similar to the black marble version in its representation of the abstracted face with wide-open, circular eyes, geometricized angular nose, and slightly open mouth, though the rich, brown wood imparts a soft warmth to this sculpture that differs from the effect of the hard-edged precision and impeccable shine of the black marble Face in the Horseman Collection.6

Carved in mahogany, the Horseman Collection’s Mask is one of several variations on this abstract motif, titled Mask or Magic Mask, that include works carved in wood, sourced in Mexico, and a version in Mexican orange onyx. While its form calls to mind the organic abstraction of modernist sculptors whose work she admired, such as Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, the sculpture’s title highlights modernist abstraction’s African roots. A formal play of line, mass and volume, and solids and spaces, Mask is composed of concave and convex curvilinear shapes that surround, but do not fully contain, the sculpture’s volumetric voids. From different vantage points, the sculpture’s openings and enclosures suggest structural support, bodily protection, and embrace.

Catlett created both of these works in 1973, at the height of the Black Arts Movement, when African American artists were called to produce work that spoke directly to the needs and aspirations of Black people and the struggle for Black liberation. While she also produced figurative sculptures that exemplify the aims and aesthetic principles of the Black Arts Movement, Catlett was convinced that her Black audience would find meaning in works such as Face and Mask that are imbued with African formal referents and the visual language of abstraction which, she often said, was “born in Africa.” This faith in her audience is evident in pieces such Mask, which, as art historian Lowery Stokes Sims proposes, “may be considered among the most stylistically radical works of Catlett’s career.”7

Elizabeth Catlett is honored as a foremother by generations of African American artists, and her work in Mexico, particularly her teaching of sculpture, had a significant impact in her adopted country. As Lowery Stokes Sims wrote in the companion publication for Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, the long-overdue retrospective of Catlett’s work that opened at the Brooklyn Museum in September 2024 and travels to the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025, “Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy… will abide for us all into the future.”8

Melanie Anne Herzog