Persevere and Resist

This welcome catalogue presents exciting new scholarship on the work ofMexican and American artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). Accompanyingan exhibition at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Persevere and Resist:The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett reconsiders her works throughthe lens of contemporary psychology and sociology.Catlett was one of the most important visual chroniclers of the African Americanexperience in the 20th century. In 1946, she was awarded the prestigiousRosenwald Fund Fellowship to travel to Mexico. Her early experiments withprintmaking with the Taller de Gráfi ca Popular resulted in a series of 15 printstitled, The Black Woman (1946–1947) of which the Memphis Brooks Museum ofArt 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 accomplishedsculptor working in stone, wood, and clay in her lengthy career, which spannedover six decades.Taking The Black Woman series as a point of departure, Heather Nickels willexplore Catlett’s oeuvre as illustrative of such contemporary phenomena as the“StrongBlackWoman” (SBW) trope, Afrofemcentrism, and misogynoir. Nickelswill off er an alternative reading of the stances, postures, and expressions ofCatlett’s women, considering the impact of intergenerational trauma, with itsroots in chattel slavery, on African Americans. After examining the SBW tropeand its paradoxes, she poses the question “What now?” and considers possibleremedies through an examination of the ways in which Black artists have minedpain 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, fullyillustrated in the catalogue. Persevere and Resist is curated by Heather Nickels,the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellow of African American Art and Art of theAfrican Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) in Memphis,Tennessee. This publication will also include an essay by noted Catlett expertDr. Melanie Herzog who will explore Catlett’s life through the lens of today’ssocial concerns.