Elizabeth Catlett Mora Life - Essay Example

Elizabeth Catlett Mora was a renowned printmaker and sculptor of American origin. She lived between 1915 and 2012. Catlett is best remembered for the political charge, black, expressionist prints and sculptures she came up within the 1960s and 1970s. One of her most famous print works is the Madonna, which she created in 1982, using lithography. In this method of printmaking, she would create an image on aluminium plates or fine-grained sandstone, with an element containing grease, for example, wash, crayon, or pencil.

Her images would then undergo multiple processes to fix them on stones, ink them, and transfer them to paper using a press (Rosenberg 1). Catlett was born during World War One and soon grew to become a leading educator and artist of African American descent. Because of this reason, she was engaged in a lot of political activism and even used her art to criticize political systems. She received a lot of criticisms and found herself in a lot of trouble for this reason. She used her art as a platform to express her political opinions, activism, and general feelings (Rosenberg 1).

Catlett managed to empower and inspire black viewers and artists. She was passionate about making black people find meaning in public art, so as to give them an art to identify with and encourage them to explore galleries and museums (Rosenberg 1).