Jan/Feb 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 1)

 

By Michael Swanger 

 

Artist Elizabeth Catlett, the granddaughter of slaves, who found her artistic voice studying at the University of Iowa but was not accepted in the university’s dormitories because of the color of her skin, would become one of the 20th century’s most influential Black female artists and eventually have a residence hall at Iowa named in her honor. To an extent, she owed her artistic success to Regionalist painter Grant Wood, who was one of her instructors at Iowa during the late 1930s and who encouraged her to focus on “what she knew.” For Catlett, who would become the first Black woman to receive her master’s degree in fine arts at Iowa in 1940, that meant drawing, painting and sculpting images of Black women and children. It would lead to decades of creating art not for the sake of art, but to humanize and dignify people who were marginalized and often overlooked. 

 

“I have always wanted my art to service my people,” Catlett said. “We have to create an art for liberation and for life.”

 

Catlett’s life began on April 15, 1915, when she was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children. Her mother was a truant officer and her father was a school teacher, having previously taught math at Tuskegee University. Tragically, he died before Catlett was born leaving her mother to care for the family while holding down several jobs. Catlett’s grandparents had been born into slavery and the stories that her grandmother told her about the hardships of being enslaved on a plantation would inform Catlett’s work. 

 

As a child, Catlett was enamored by art and decided to become an artist. She enrolled in art classes in high school and during her teenage years she participated in demonstrations at the U.S. Supreme Court Building in the nation’s capital city to protest lynchings of Black people. Her commitment to equality and justice would inform her politically-charged artwork, especially when addressing issues of race, gender and the rights of workers. 

 

After high school, Catlett was refused admission to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Mellon University) due to her race, despite her high scores on college entrance exams. So she enrolled at Howard University, the private, historically Black university based in her hometown, with the assistance of her mother’s savings and scholarships. At Howard University she took classes in design, drawing, printmaking and art history with the intention of becoming a teacher, graduating cum laude in 1937. 

 

Following her graduation from Howard University, the 22-year-old Catlett took a job teaching high school art in Durham, N.C., her mother’s hometown. But her work as an educator—for the time being—would soon be disrupted when she became aware of Wood’s paintings depicting the rural Midwest and discovered that the famous artist was teaching at Iowa. 

 

 

In 1938, Catlett moved to Iowa City to study drawing and painting under Wood at Iowa’s newly established art school. At Iowa she also began making sculptures in wood, clay, plaster and bronze. Encouraged by Wood to make her art about “something you know the most about,” Catlett began churning out works of art about women, Black people and the working class. Her work, which was devoted to the human figure throughout her life, was also inspired by Wood’s disciplined and meticulous approach. Later, she called Wood “a very generous teacher.”

 

While she was honing her craft in the classroom, Catlett’s art and deep sense of social justice would also be influenced by the harsh realities of the times in which lived in Iowa City. Segregation was not exclusive to the Jim Crow South regarding matters of education, employment, housing, dining, etc. In spite of her enrollment at the University of Iowa, like other Black students she was not accepted into the university’s dormitories because of her skin color and she was left to fend for herself to secure off-campus housing. Catlett found it at the Federation Home at 942 Iowa Ave., which was a private house for Black women, among other places in Iowa City. 

 

“I’d lived in an African American culture my whole life … in Iowa City, I suddenly was living among white people, but I still couldn’t do things like live in the dorms,” Catlett said. 

 

Not only were Black students not allowed in Iowa’s dormitories at the time, but they were forbidden from entering the student Union and many Iowa City restaurants, according to the university’s archives. Catlett occasionally worked as a waitress at Vivian’s Chicken Shack in exchange for meals. The restaurant was owned by Black Iowa alum Vivian Trent.

 

During her time at Iowa, the Washington, D.C., native befriended and roomed briefly with aspiring writer and poet Margaret Walker, a student enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop who was involved with the Chicago Black Renaissance. Both women would acquire their master’s degrees from Iowa. Later in Catlett’s career, she created a series of six prints in 1992 that were inspired by Walker’s 1937 poem, “For My People.” Those and other prints by Catlett are housed at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. 

 

In 1940, Catlett became one of three students to earn the first master’s of fine arts degrees from Iowa, and the first Black woman to do so. 

 

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