ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Catlett was uniquely situated at the mid-twentieth century as an African American woman artist living and working at the center of Mexico's most politically active artists' community of the left. This particular social and geographic position shaped her artistic practice as she developed a visual language to articulate her transnational and inclusive leftist politics and render visible the layers of identification and affiliation that, in Mexico, accrued to her sense of identity as a black woman artist. The political and social consciousness that Catlett brought to Mexico was forged within the African American artists' circles in Chicago and New York of which she was part during the first half of the 1940s. In Mexico at mid-century, as an artist, activist, educator, wife, and mother, Catlett experienced profound social, political, and personal transformations as she navigated gender and visual politics across cultural borders.
