Persevere and Resist

This welcome catalogue presents exciting new scholarship on the work of
Mexican and American artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). Accompanying
an exhibition at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Persevere and Resist:
The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett reconsiders her works through
the lens of contemporary psychology and sociology.
Catlett was one of the most important visual chroniclers of the African American
experience in the 20th century. In 1946, she was awarded the prestigious
Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to travel to Mexico. Her early experiments with
printmaking with the Taller de Gráfi ca Popular resulted in a series of 15 prints
titled, The Black Woman (1946–1947) of which the Memphis Brooks Museum of
Art is one of only three known American arts institutions to own a full series.
In addition to her print and drawing practice, Catlett was also an accomplished
sculptor working in stone, wood, and clay in her lengthy career, which spanned
over six decades.
Taking The Black Woman series as a point of departure, Heather Nickels will
explore Catlett’s oeuvre as illustrative of such contemporary phenomena as the
“StrongBlackWoman” (SBW) trope, Afrofemcentrism, and misogynoir. Nickels
will off er an alternative reading of the stances, postures, and expressions of
Catlett’s women, considering the impact of intergenerational trauma, with its
roots in chattel slavery, on African Americans. After examining the SBW trope
and its paradoxes, she poses the question “What now?” and considers possible
remedies through an examination of the ways in which Black artists have mined
pain and sorrow to inform and inspire literary, performing and visual production,
creating Black joy in spaces made by and for Black women.
On view at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from June 5 to August 29,
2021, the exhibition will feature approximately 35 prints and sculptures, fully
illustrated in the catalogue. Persevere and Resist is curated by Heather Nickels,
the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellow of African American Art and Art of the
African Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) in Memphis,
Tennessee. This publication will also include an essay by noted Catlett expert
Dr. Melanie Herzog who will explore Catlett’s life through the lens of today’s
social concerns.