Elizabeth Catlett, Stepping Out, 2000

Elizabeth Catlett was a trailblazer. Born in Washington, DC, in 1915, she spent her childhood hearing stories of enslavement and resistance told to her by her grandmother. Fueled by her history and heritage, Catlett dedicated seven decades to a career that saw her sculpt, draw, and print dignified and uplifting portraits of African American people. The sculpture Stepping Out from the year 2000 is one such example.

Let’s go back to Catlett’s beginnings. A student of Howard University, a historically Black research university in Washington, DC, in the 1930s, Catlett was taught by Lois Mailou Jones, a key painter and figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Later, she would study with the American Realist Grant Wood, and it was he who encouraged her to make art about what she knew best: her own story.

Catlett made prints of sharecroppers, mother and child sculptures, and drawings of men and women to inspire people at a time of political and social unrest. Through her art, she advocated for social change with key political messaging.

She based herself in the US, but due to growing suspicions of Communist leanings, in the 1940s, Catlett relocated to Mexico City. She joined the radical printmaking collective the Taller de Gráfica Popular and remained in Mexico for the rest of her life.

Stepping Out is a near life-size sculpture of a woman and was completed towards the end of her career. Positioned with one foot forward, as if moving — or perhaps “stepping out” — into the future, she wears a formfitting dress and low heeled shoes on her feet, as if to show and own her femininity.

When I first saw this work at the de Young, I looked around me at the other works displayed here. In the modern and contemporary art gallery, we see paintings of workers, stories exploring American Realism and urbanization, and the tensions between city and rural life. Many of these artists in the space grew up at a similar time to Catlett, but I love how the curators made Stepping Out the room’s focal point — as if punctuating it with the voice and image of a woman going about her day with poise and elegance.

So many of our museums are populated with sculptures of Grecian-style women — such as the nude or seminude Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex. But here, Catlett shows us a new icon: the everyday woman, an icon for a more hopeful, and more real, liberated world.

Just as Catlett wrote of her art: “It must answer a question, or wake somebody up, or give a shove in the right direction — our liberation.”