racial justice – Art & Theology

Roundup: Stained glass by Kerry James Marshall, “Still I Rise” choreography, Black Liturgies, and more

February 5, 2026February 5, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

February is Black History Month, and while I endeavor to showcase Black art year-round, today’s post gives it dedicated attention.

VIDEO: “Kerry James Marshall, Now and Forever; Elizabeth Alexander, ‘American Song,’ Washington National Cathedral,” Smarthistory, January 22, 2024: Art historian Beth Harris and Kevin Eckstrom, former chief public affairs officer of Washington National Cathedral, explore the latest artwork to be permanently installed in the US capital’s “house of prayer for all people”: two Now and Forever stained glass windows by Kerry James Marshall, depicting a march for racial justice. Unveiled on September 23, 2023, these replace windows that memorialized Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1953. (For my international readers: The Confederacy was a group of eleven Southern US states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to preserve the institution of race-based chattel slavery on which their plantation economies relied; its government was dissolved in 1865 following the end of the Civil War, but its legacy continued.)

In 2015, when a white supremacist, who touted the Confederate flag as symbolic of his ideology, murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington National Cathedral’s dean at the time, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, called for the removal of the Lee-Jackson windows, which initiated a two-year discernment process involving ample community discussions. The cathedral finally took down the windows in 2017 following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed yet another life. The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, then the dean, said the windows “were a barrier to our mission, and an impediment to worship in this place.” Their removal and the installation of the Now and Forever windows in their place were funded by private foundations.

Marshall, Kerry James_Now and Forever — Kerry James Marshall (American, 1955–), *Now and Forever*, 2023. Fabricated by Andrew Goldkuhle. Stained glass windows, south outer aisle, bay 7, Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photo: Steven Zucker.

“American Song” by Elizabeth Alexander, commissioned by Washington National Cathedral and inscribed below Kerry James Marshall’s Now and Forever windows in bay 7. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

In addition to commissioning Marshall to design new windows, the cathedral commissioned the Pulitzer-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and read “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, to write a poem for this occasion. Titled “American Song,” it is inscribed on two limestone tablets beneath Marshall’s windows. The Windows Replacement Committee gave both artists this assignment:

We seek to tell a story of resilience, endurance, and courage that gives meaning and expression to the long and arduous plight of the African American, from slavery to freedom, from alienation to the hope of reconciliation, through physical and spiritual regeneration, as we move from the past to present day. The artist will capture both darkness and light, both the pain of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow, as well as the quiet and exemplary dignity of the African American struggle for justice and equality and the indelible and progressive impact it has had on American society. Each artist should respond in his or her own creative way to these ideals and aspirations, framing both the earthly and the divine, within the sacred space of the Washington National Cathedral.

When I was there last year, I asked the guide why the signs the figures hold don’t bear any of the more familiar slogans of our historical moment, such as “Black Lives Matter.” She said the artist deliberately did not want to tether the protest to a particular time period, in order to emphasize that the struggle for racial equality is ongoing. “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” “No,” “Not”—these are expressions of demand and defiance that could apply to a number of justice-related issues and that encompass people of all races.

Learn more at https://cathedral.org/college/windows/.

+++

DANCE: “Still I Rise,” choreographed by Sean Cheesman: I really miss the TV show So You Think You Can Dance, which had aspiring dancers train across genres—contemporary, hip-hop, ballroom, jazz, etc.—with renowned choreographers, performing to compete for the title of “America’s favorite dancer.” It was entertaining, impressive (the athleticism!), and often moving. Here’s a contemporary routine choreographed by Sean Cheesman to spoken word artist Alexis Henry’s reading of a classic poem by Maya Angelou about Black strength and defiance. It’s danced by Koine “Koko” Iwasaki, Kiki Nyemchek, Taylor Sieve, and Mark Villaver. It’s from season 14, episode 12, which aired September 4, 2017.

(Another memorable Cheesman-choreographed dance from season 14 is an African jazz duet to Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II,” which unfortunately, I cannot find online.)

+++

ARTICLE: “Stephen Towns’ Quilted Works Emphasize Black Joy as Resistance in ‘Safer Waters’” by Kate Mothes: Through June 14, the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas is hosting the exhibition Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury, featuring eleven quilts and six paintings by the Baltimore-based artist Stephen Towns [previously]. Black history has always been an important aspect of Towns’s work, and in this series he was inspired by historic photographs (by Bruce Mozert) of Paradise Park, a segregated attraction in Silver Springs, Florida, that operated from 1949 to 1969 and that was popular among Black vacationers, providing a space for leisure and togetherness away from Jim Crow.

Towns, Stephen_All We Knew Was Joy — Stephen Towns (American, 1980–), *All We Knew Was Joy*, 2025. Natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, cubic zirconia, glass beads, and shell, 55 × 65 1/2 in.

Towns began his Paradise Park series in 2022 after reading Remembering Paradise Park by Cynthia Wilson-Graham and Lu Vickers, and this show is a continuation of it, for which he made seven new quilts (pictured in Mothes’s article). His art is displayed alongside some of Mozert’s photographs and related objects from Florida archives and collectors. See an exhibition walk-through on the artist’s Instagram page; see also photos from the opening on January 16–17.

Here is a short 2024 interview with Towns about this body of work, as presented at the earlier exhibition Private Paradise: A Figurative Exploration of Black Rest and Recreation at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York:

+++

SONGS:

Gospel music is one of the many gifts the Black church has given the world. Here are two songs from that distinctive choral tradition.

>> “Perfect Praise (How Excellent)” by Brenda Joyce Moore, performed by the Sunday Service Choir: Written in 1989 based on Psalm 8, this song gained recognition through its performance on the 1990 album This Is the Day by Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago, featuring Lecresia Campbell. It has since become a gospel choir standard, though often with the lead vocals eliminated (and that part taken by the full choir). It’s performed in this video by Sunday Service at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris on March 1, 2020.

>> “He’s a Wonder” by Jamel Garner, performed by the Chicago Mass Choir, feat. Cornelius Owens: This song about Jesus’s miracles is from the Chicago Mass Choir’s 2024 album Greater Is Coming.

+++

PODCAST EPISODES:

>> “Artist Archetypes with Jakari Sherman,” Be. Make. Do., January 21, 2025: I really enjoyed this conversation with Jakari Sherman on the soul|makers podcast hosted by Rev. Lisa Cole Smith, where he describes his journey as an artist and a believer. Sherman is a choreographer within the tradition of stepping, a percussive dance practice in which dancers use primarily their hands and feet to create music. Stepping comes from the African American Greek letter organizations and has roots, Sherman explains, in the antebellum South, where enslaved people had their drums taken away and thus had to find ways to express the rhythms they felt using just the floor and their own bodies. (Tap evolved largely for the same reason.)

Sherman is the creative director of [Jk]creativ, a multidisciplinary company developing purpose-driven and truth-seeking cultural works. From 2007 to 2014 he served as the artistic director of Step Afrika! and has continued to develop and direct works for them, such as Drumfolk and The Migration (which I saw in 2024 and was excellent). To establish a foundation for his scholarly research on the history of stepping, he completed a master of arts program in ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in 2015. Below is a trailer for one of Sherman’s latest works, Our Road Home, an interactive rhythmic production that meditates “on what is means to find freedom—and to live it fully in body, soul, and spirit”; it premiered last June as part of a year-long collaboration with the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.

>> “Cole Arthur Riley – Black Liturgies,” Nomad, February 9, 2024: Tim Nash interviews Cole Arthur Riley, the best-selling author of Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human (which grew out of her popular Instagram account @blackliturgies) and This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. She is a wise, feeling, richly spiritual and embodied writer and speaker whose work I’ve appreciated. In this conversation she discusses her hang-ups with the Book of Common Prayer; battling chronic illness; balancing the active and contemplative lives; the revival of lament; self-sacrifice versus self-care; her experience of white people engaging with her work (“I like to think that there’s something mysterious that’s healed in us when we encounter each other’s interior worlds; when we hear words written by a Black woman toward God, that that could somehow move someone in some way, and move us closer to each other”); and what hope means to her and where she sees signs of it.

Even though I, as a white person, am not the intended audience for the book Black Liturgies, in reading it, I found it meaningful to listen to the cries of Riley’s heart. While many of the prayers are particular to the experience of being Black, still many others are general enough that they could be prayed by anyone. Part 1, organized thematically, consists of chapters such as “Dignity,” “Wonder,” “Doubt,” “Lament,” “Rage,” and “Rest,” whereas part 2 contains prayers for dawn, day, and dusk as well as for the liturgical year, secular holidays, and life occasions. I like the names for God with which she opens each prayer—e.g., “God of the shadows,” “God who expands,” “Divine Labyrinth,” “God aware,” “God of locked doors,” “God who reclaims,” “God our home,” “God of delight,” “God of the art that will never be seen,” “God who whispers”; it has prompted me to consider the names and descriptions I use for God and how they influence how I pray.

To give you a flavor of Black Liturgies, here are two prayers from the book (and note that prayers are only one component; also included are letters, quotes, questions for contemplation, confessions and assurances of pardon, and benedictions):

For Marveling at Your Own Face

God of the flesh,
When we consider what is worthy of our wonder, it is easy to forget our own faces, our bodies. The world is relentless in indoctrinating us into self-hatred—into anti-Blackness, into transphobia, into misogyny in all forms. We are slowly and steadily brainwashed to despise our own faces from the time we’re tall enough to stare up at ourselves in the mirror. How can we resist this? Let the tyranny of the mirror be no more. May it instead become a portal—to delight, to pleasure, and to love. These noses, these hips, the way our hair rises and falls. The memories etched into our hands and faces. Remind us of the miracle of flesh that grows back, of blood that pulses warm beneath the skin that holds us. Of bodies, these holy beautiful bodies, that are working a thousand unseen miracles just so that we can read these lines, breathe this air, cry or not cry. As we peer into the face before us, remind us that we are something to behold. We believe; forgive our unbelief. Ase.

For Those Who Doomscroll

Still God,
We confess that we are addicted to pessimism. Although we rarely name it as such, so much of our attention is devoted to negativity. Show us how we use technology to soothe and stir the aches in us. Keep us from turning control over to our anxiety, that it would no longer feed itself with news of tragedy and impending disaster. It is easy to become lost, buried in the quicksand of digital catastrophe. Draw our attention upward. Guide us to look away habitually; and not just away, but up at the sky, the grass, the table. Guide us inward as well. Acquaint us with goodness again. In the world, and in ourselves. Let us follow the children, freed from the grip of seriousness. Renew our playfulness. Lead us into wise rhythms of engagement, retreating to rest and breathe. Remind us that there is much the world needs, including our attention to atrocity—but if we watch the world burn for long enough, the fire will become our only reality. Amen.

Christmas, Day 4: Mothers March On

December 28, 2025December 28, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Today’s format is a little bit different, in that the visual art and music are part of a singular video piece which also prominently features dance—so, multiple media all wrapped up into one.

Every year in the church calendar, December 28 commemorates the Massacre of the Innocents—the boys of Bethlehem slain by agents of the state, deployed by Herod, who feared the perceived threat they posed. The story is told in Matthew 2:16–18 and quotes the prophet Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

While the remembrance marks this ancient event specifically, the church also takes the occasion to pray for present-day innocents who have been victimized by the powerful. For example, the collect (succinct prayer) for this day from the Book of Common Prayer reads:

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The artists of today’s piece, made in 2019, confront the unjustified killing of Black men in America by police. They do not make the explicit connection to Herod’s massacre, but I do, as I hear, in the many Black mothers who have lost their children to state violence, Rachel weeping and refusing to be comforted. And I see Herod-like rulers who want to silence those wails and reverse the progress made in awareness and reform.

LOOK & LISTEN: The Ritual of Being, a site-specific dance performance by T. Lang in front of the Mothers March On mural by Sheila Pree Bright, 2019

The 2010s was a decade of racial reckoning in America. In response to neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman’s killing of the unarmed Black teen Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013, demanding policing and criminal justice reform and the safety of marginalized Black communities. BLM activism and the continual miscarriages of racial justice that prompt it received ample media coverage all the way through the movement’s peak in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. That coverage has lessened in the last few years, but the movement is still active, and mothers still bear the wound of their slain children.

In 2019, the lens-based artist Sheila Pree Bright, author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests, brought together nine mothers who are fighting for justice for their boys whose lives were taken from them by police. She wanted to give them a safe space to talk, and to photograph them. The portrait Mothers March On depicts, from left to right, Tynesha Tilson (mother of Shali Tilson), Wanda Johnson (mother of Oscar Grant), Felicia Thomas (mother of Nicholas Thomas), Gwen Carr (mother of Eric Garner), Monteria Robinson (mother of Jamarion Robinson), Dr. Roslyn Pope (author of An Appeal for Human Rights), Dalphine Robinson (mother of Jabril Robinson), Patricia Scott (mother of Raemawn Scott), Montye Benjamin (mother of Jayvis Benjamin), and Samaria Rice (mother of Tamir Rice).

Bright, Sheila Pree_Mothers March On — Sheila Pree Bright (American, 1967–), *Mothers March On*, 2019. Vinyl-print photo mural installed at 190 Pryor Street, Atlanta, Georgia, 30 × 60 ft. (9.1 × 18.3 m).

Carr, whose son died in the chokehold of an NYPD officer who ignored his cries of “I can’t breathe,” is the focal point of the image, with her arms outstretched and fingers spread. This body language connotes an offering of self to the cause of justice and a readiness to receive it. That her hands are open rather than clenched in a fist indicates unguardedness, while her planted feet indicate firmness.

The woman in glasses beside Carr is Roslyn Pope, who died in 2023. A mother to two daughters, she had not herself lost a child to police violence, but she was part of Mothers March On on account of her seminal civil rights work in Atlanta. In 1960, while serving as president of the student government at Spelman College, she drafted the manifesto An Appeal for Human Rights, announcing the formation of the Atlanta Student Movement, whose campaign of civil disobedience would contribute to the dissolution of racist Jim Crow laws across the region. In a 2020 interview for the sixtieth anniversary of the manifesto’s publication, Pope expressed concern that some of the students’ hard-fought gains were being eroded, telling the Associated Press, “We have to be careful. It’s not as if we can rest and think that all is well.”

Sheila Pree Bright describes the photo she composed:

The Mothers March On photographic project is about Black women who have witnessed the tragic loss of their children who have fallen to police brutality. . . . This project pays homage to the sacrifices, wisdom, and guidance of Black mothers as nurturers and protectors who are passing on a legacy of determination and love, showing how they are fierce and tender, protective and vulnerable, and strong and soft. I’m honoring the struggles of Black mothers, celebrating the beauty of their strength and resilience. These mothers continue to march on for Human rights for their children to bring attention to the urgent need for police reform and the systemic racism that continues to fuel police brutality against Black bodies since slavery.

La Tanya S. Autry writes for Hyperallergic:

Bright’s depiction . . . stresses Black mothers’ memory, determination, love, and corporeality. Through the repetition of standing figures, the portrait insists on the integrity of Black bodily form. The women speak back to lynching culture. With rose petals at their feet, like fallen bodies of their murdered sons, these mothers, on the front-lines of state violence, refuse to relent. They know who and what has been taken from them; they will never forget. . . .

The various activist work of these mothers is astounding, and they include organizing family support groups, such as Georgia Moms United, legislative advocacy of Georgia House Bill 378 (Use of Force Data Collection Act) to track police violence, and developing youth centers, such as the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center.

Bright printed the portrait in large scale and pasted it on the side of a brick retail building at 190 Pryor Street in Atlanta, Georgia, near the Georgia State Capitol. Then, for ProtectYoHeART Day in Atlanta, she and the performance artist T. Lang collaborated on a video piece at that site, where T. Lang dances before the mural to the aching instrumental jazz piece “Alabama” by the saxophonist John Coltrane. (Coltrane wrote the music as a memorial for the four girls who were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; learn more here.) Clothed in a fringe dress, T. Lang spins, jerks, reaches, heaves, throws herself against the wall, crouches, withers, bursts, climbs, pulls, and walks forward, movements of grief and struggle capped by resolve.

A temporary installation, the Mothers March On mural is no longer on Pryor Street.

I first learned about Sheila Pree Bright’s photography from a compelling series of hers that I saw at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, titled Young Americans. In it she invited people across the US between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to pose with the American flag in whatever way they felt most comfortable. “My practice moves between documentary and conceptual work, from portraiture to constructed realities—always grounded in truth, history, and lived experience,” Bright says.

Mother-child artworks by Elizabeth Catlett

May 10, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Last month I saw the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, an impactful display of over two hundred prints and sculptures from throughout Catlett’s illustrious seven-decade career. Organized in partnership with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it first opened last year, the show focuses on Catlett’s advocacy, through her art and her on-the-ground activism, against poverty, racism, war, and gender oppression—her promotion of human dignity and freedom for all. Her work especially celebrates the beauty and strength of African American working-class women.

The exhibition title comes from a speech Catlett delivered in May 1970 by phone from Mexico to attendees at the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art at Northwestern University outside Chicago, which she could not attend in person because the United States refused her entry to the country on the grounds of her allegedly dangerous politics: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies,” Catlett stated.

Born in 1915 in Washington, DC, and raised there, Catlett witnessed class inequality, racial discrimination, and US imperialism firsthand, which formed her consciousness and influenced the direction her art would go. After graduating from Howard University, she spent time teaching in Durham (North Carolina), New Orleans, and Harlem and studying art in Iowa and Chicago before permanently settling in Mexico in 1946, becoming a Mexican citizen in 1962. She married the Mexican printmaker and muralist Francisco Mora in 1947, and they had three children together, all sons.

Black motherhood is a recurring subject in Catlett’s work, starting with her MFA thesis project in 1941 at the University of Iowa, a limestone sculpture of a mother and child that won first prize at the America Negro Exposition in Chicago that year but that is now lost. “Black women have been cast in the role of carrying on the survival of Black people through their position as mothers and wives, protecting and educating and stimulating children and Black men,” Catlett said. “We can learn from Black women. They have had to struggle for centuries.”

The social justice framework of the current retrospective exhibition leaves plenty of room for Catlett’s depictions of mothers with their children. What follows are photos I took of some such works.

Catlett, Elizabeth_Mother and Child — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *Mother and Child*, 1956. Terracotta, 28.6 × 17.8 × 17.8 cm (11 1/4 × 7 × 7 in.). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

My favorite is a terracotta sculpture made just a year after the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, whose mother Mamie Till’s response was an important catalyst of the civil rights movement. It brings two bodies—that of mother and infant son—into one volume. Art historian Leah Dickerman remarks on

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. . . . Catlett seems to capture, somehow, the idea of remembering something fleeting, the sculpture a tiny memorial to loving protection that cannot be maintained.

Catlett, Elizabeth_Mother and Child (detail)

Platformed across from this sculpture is another, in mahogany, this one modernist, abstracted:

It shows a mother holding her baby in a swaddle, his or her head gleefully poking out from the folds. While the baby seems happy, the mother seems stressed, as she turns her head away and grabs her head with her hand, which I interpret as her taking a deep breath to compose herself for several more hours of caregiving before bedtime.

Another mahogany sculpture is borrowed from the New Orleans Museum of Art:

The adjacent wall text quotes art historian Melanie Anne Herzog, author of Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico:

Becoming a mother, Catlett told me, was her most creative endeavor. She returned to the theme of maternity throughout her career in sculptures that illuminate the intimate physical bond between mother and child, a child’s comfort in its mother’s embrace, and the anguish of mothers who know they cannot protect their children from future harm. Catlett’s boldly corporeal rendering of maternity centers Black and Brown women in her depiction of this universal theme. I feel the fierce tenderness of this stately standing figure cradling her child, its body melded with hers. Her pensive expression and resolute stance call us to reflect on what she has endured and what her child, too, will encounter in the world that awaits.

One of Catlett’s earliest prints of the mother-child subject is a lithograph from 1944:

The label notes how it “recasts Christian Madonna and Child iconography in the context of a racially segregated United States. A leafless tree in the background and the mother’s protective clutch hint at the brutal history of lynching and violence against Black people.”

Even after her move to Mexico, Catlett remained connected to the Black liberation struggle in the US. Her Torture of Mothers from 1970 is based on the photograph by Bud Lee published on the cover of Life magazine’s July 28, 1967, issue, showing a twelve-year-old Black boy lying in a pool of his own blood in the middle of a street in Newark, New Jersey, having been shot by two stray police bullets. The police were trying to suppress the riots that had erupted in protest of the beating of a Black cab driver in Newark by two white police officers, and while Joe Bass Jr. was outside playing with his friends, he got caught in the crossfire.

Catlett, Elizabeth_Torture of Mothers — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *Torture of Mothers*, 1970. Hand-colored lithograph, sheet: 38.1 × 56.5 cm (15 × 22 1/4 in.); framed: 48.3 × 66 cm (19 × 26 in.). Collection of Juanita and Melvin Hardy.

“Catlett’s composition visualizes the emotional toll such events have on Black mothers and women of color more broadly,” the gallery label reads—mothers whose minds are continually haunted by the racial violence, sometimes even state-authorized, that threatens the safety of their boys. “While Catlett was tracking police brutality in the US, she was also aware of similar state violence against Mexican youth, including the mass shooting of student protestors in 1968 by police at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México where Catlett taught.”

Several of the mothers in Catlett’s art are posed in a protective embrace that seeks to shield their children from harm. The arms of her 1982 Madonna, for example, wrap around a son and a daughter, though her averted eyes look worried:

Catlett, Elizabeth_Madonna — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *Madonna*, 1982. Lithograph, sheet: 76.2 × 56.5 cm (30 × 22 1/4 in.). Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa, Iowa City.

In African American families, children are often raised by their grandmothers. Reflecting adaptability and support, such kinship care is memorialized in These Two Generations, which shows in profile a young boy and the primary maternal figure and caregiver in his life: his grandma.

Catlett, Elizabeth_These Two Generations — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *These Two Generations*, 1979, printed 1987. Lithograph, image: 48.3 x 55.7 cm (19 x 21 15/16 in.); sheet: 56.7 x 76.2 cm (22 5/16 x 30 in.); framed: 69.9 x 80 cm (27 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.). Collection of Otis and Harryette Robertson.

Skipping ahead to this millennium, the exhibition includes Danys y Liethis, a portrait of the artist’s niece and great-niece:

Catlett, Elizabeth_Danys y Liethis — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *Danys y Liethis*, 2005. Offset lithograph, sheet: 71 × 50.8 cm (27 15/16 × 20 in.); framed: 91.4 × 71.1 cm (36 × 28 in.). Collection of Barbara J. Luke.

Lastly, suspended from the ceiling at the exhibition’s entrance/exit, is Catlett’s most unique mother-child sculpture, Floating Family:

Catlett, Elizabeth_Floating Family — Elizabeth Catlett (American, active in Mexico, 1915–2012), *Floating Family*, 1995. Mexican primavera wood, overall length: 304.8 cm (120 in.). Collection of the Chicago Public Library.

It’s striking! Art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt writes beautifully about it on her Substack, whose words I’ll close with:

In many of her depictions of motherhood, Catlett unifies the mother and child into a single form, emphasizing their intimacy. But I’ve been thinking about her large-scale sculpture Floating Family, which usually hangs above the circulation desk at the Legler Branch of the Chicago Public Library. Here, mother and daughter are still tethered together, but instead of standing upright they are now perfectly horizontal. Are they maple seed pods, spinning and falling to the earth to plant something new? Or a rotor, lifting upwards, leaving gravity behind? Despite the seeming precarity of the moment, the mother’s face is calm and set, and the daughter looks up at her, trusting.

I imagine that it does something different in the context of a library than as the closing object in a museum retrospective. For me in October, after seeing so many sculptures of mothers cuddling their children close, this work evoked the particular terror and thrill of parenting adolescents. Now, it suggests more than that: the labor and love we give not only our children but our communities and the way that hope can sometimes feel like a free fall.

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist will continue through July 6, 2025, at the National Gallery of Art before traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago for its final leg from August 30, 2025, to January 4, 2026. You can purchase the exhibition catalog here and view some of my other photos on Instagram.

“Martin Luther King Jr.” by Gwendolyn Brooks

January 12, 2022January 12, 2022 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Saint James, Synthia_The Dream — Synthia Saint James (American, 1949–), *The Dream*, 2013. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 34 × 26 in.

A man went forth with gifts.
He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.
He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
     reading the world.
His Dream still wishes to anoint
     the barricades of faith and of control.
His word still burns the center of the sun
     above the thousands and the
     hundred thousands.
The word was Justice. It was spoken.
So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many other honors, wrote this poem in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was originally published that year as a broadside by Broadside Press in Detroit, and it appears in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Negro Americans (Macmillan, 1968).

Listen to Brooks’s daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, read the poem in this WBEZ Chicago broadcast from 2018:

(Update: If the embedded video player is not showing up for you, click here.)