Elizabeth Catlett spent her career making work the mainstream art world wasn’t prepared for — linocuts and sculptures that placed Black women at the center of the visual frame, monumental and uncompromising. On July 1, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts brings that legacy into a lunchtime conversation at its Art at Noon series, with Princeton scholar Charmaine Branch leading the discussion on Elizabeth Catlett’s pedagogy and the networks of artists she built and sustained across her lifetime.

Elizabeth Catlett at PAFA: What’s Already on the Wall

Catlett (1915–2012) was the first African American woman to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she studied under Grant Wood. She later headed the sculpture department at Dillard University before relocating to Mexico and joining the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a printmaking collective committed to art as social instrument. Her subject throughout was Black women — their labor, their resistance, their inner lives — made monumental on terms she set entirely herself.

PAFA holds three Catlett linocuts in its permanent collection, all from the Art by Women Collection, Gift of Linda Lee Alter. In Harriett Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom (1946) shows a determined woman leading figures through darkness; In Phyllis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery (1946) places an enslaved woman at a writing desk with chained figures behind her; I am the Negro Woman (1947) is a close, introspective portrait — still and certain.

The July 1 lecture draws these works into conversation with PAFA’s current exhibition A Nation of Artists, using recent scholarship on Catlett’s legacy as the connective thread between the prints on the wall and the broader questions the exhibition is asking about American artistic identity and whose voices have shaped it.

Charmaine Branch on the Pedagogy of Elizabeth Catlett

Charmaine Branch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of Art & Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University and an independent curator and art historian. Before her doctorate, she held curatorial fellowships at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art. Her research focuses on art of the Black Diaspora, with particular attention to printmaking, community-oriented pedagogy, and Black feminist thought.

Branch’s lecture is not a biographical survey of Catlett. The argument she’s making is about networks: the interconnected communities of Black women artists — friends, collaborators, mentors, mentees — who formed the foundation for African Diasporic artistic production from the mid-twentieth century into the early twenty-first. Catlett didn’t only make work; she built conditions in which others could make it, and Branch will examine how that pedagogy operated in practice.

Art at Noon: Elizabeth Catlett at PAFA, July 1

The lecture takes place Wednesday, July 1, from noon to 1pm in the Rhoden Arts Center at the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad Street. Admission is Pay-What-You-Wish, from $0 to $20. The program is in-person only; registration is open through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts website.

It is a Wednesday lunch hour and the ticket can cost nothing. The argument Elizabeth Catlett made with her prints — that Black women belong at the center of the visual record — has not stopped being true. Branch will make the case for why it still matters.

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Allan Lane

Philadelphia born and bred, Allan Lane is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of digital magazines. He launched his first publication, SportBikes Inc Magazine in 2010, followed by dosage MAGAZINE in 2019. Recently, Allan launched his third online publication, Club For Man. As a journalist, Allan covers fashion, lifestyle, culture, art, and motorcycles.

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