Elizabeth Catlett’s Mother and Child

Elizabeth Catlett’s terra cotta sculpture Mother and Child stands less than a foot off of its pedestal, but it feels much larger. It conveys an expansiveness that comes, to my mind, from the uncanny way that it seems both intimate and monumental at once. Intimacy lies in the way the weight of the child’s face presses against the mother’s breast, the mother’s right leg pushed back to stabilize her balance and her head nestled against the child’s scalp, breathing in that smell. Tenderness, both affectionate and shielding, is conveyed so keenly it almost aches. In Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, curator Anne Umland surmises that the work’s “particular quality of physicality...likely owes to Catlett’s own experience as a mother: the impression is less of a model observed than of memories of what it feels like to cradle the weight of a child.” Catlett seems to capture, somehow, the idea of remembering something fleeting, the sculpture a tiny memorial to loving protection that cannot be maintained.

This wasn’t the first time Catlett had addressed the subject of motherhood. In 1941, for her thesis project as an MFA student at the University of Iowa, where she had enrolled to study with the famous regionalist painter Grant Wood, Catlett carved a limestone sculpture, now lost: it also focused on the figures of a Black mother cradling her child against her breast, two bodies brought into one volume. The work attracted the attention of intrepid MoMA curator Dorothy Miller while she was visiting the school, and it won first prize at the 1941 America Negro Exposition in Chicago. Yet despite the promise it revealed, the earlier sculpture conveys a different sensibility, seen across the divide of before and after the experiences that would make her the artist she would become.

It was made before the trip to the South that she took in 1941 with her first husband—the artist Charles White, who had been awarded a Rosenwald Foundation “genius” grant—where she witnessed the dehumanizing intensity of the American Jim Crow regime firsthand and vowed to raise awareness of it with her work. It was made before Catlett’s move to Mexico five years later, supported by a Rosenwald Foundation grant of her own, to create a series of prints on “the role of the Negro women in the fight for democratic rights in the history of the United States,” which gave her a new perspective on the long legacy of this country’s racism. And it was before she captured the attention of the US House Committee for Un-American Activities for her political activism at the height of McCarthyism in the late 1940s. Perhaps most importantly, it was made before Catlett’s own experience of motherhood with the three boys she birthed and raised with her beloved second husband, the Mexican artist Francisco Mora.

Catlett returned to the US briefly after her fellowship year to secure her divorce from White and to show the print series and other work at her first solo show organized by the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC. Concerned about being summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, she quickly went back to Mexico, this time permanently—one among the many African American writers and artists who chose self-exile in response to US racism and political purges of the left. Interviewing her years later, scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked Catlett why she decided to become a Mexican citizen. She replied that in Mexico, “I was just a woman; I didn’t have to be a Black woman.”

It is difficult for me, given this context, to imagine that in making her Mother and Child in 1956, Catlett didn’t intend for it to carry an international political resonance. The year before, 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose family had moved north to Chicago, went to spend the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi, and was kidnapped and lynched. “When I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and to cry,” recalled his mother Mamie Till. “And that’s when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn’t get any help carrying this load.” Determined that the world should know what happened to her son, Mamie Till rejected attempts to pass over or cover up the brutality of his murder: she allowed photographs of his young face, beaten beyond recognition, to be published in Jet magazine, and insisted that his body be brought home to be displayed in a glass-topped casket in Chicago, where it was seen by tens of thousands who joined her to bear witness. Emmett Till’s murder, and the international attention it attracted through Mamie Till’s actions, became a rallying cry for the civil rights movement. Catlett’s sculpture evokes this strength of purpose, as well as the longing to hold close those whom we love, and to keep them safe through the armoring force of our devotion.

Now these decades later, we have heard young Black men call for their mothers while facing contemporary forms of lynching. Many mothers, walking in the footsteps of Mamie Till, have turned into activists determined to speak forthrightly, to seek justice, and to prevent what happened to their children from happening to others. In Catlett’s work, we can find the memorial we need today.