Three Artists You Should Know

Elizabeth Catlet 

Because I am a woman and know how a woman feels in body and mind, I sculpt, draw, and print women, generally black women.
~ Elizabeth Catlett

"During her lifetime, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) achieved international fame for her powerful explorations of race, class, and her own African American female identity. As a young woman, she studied art in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Art with a social message became particularly relevant, with the U.S. government supporting public art through the Works Progress Administration and other program."

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"While Catlett often reflected elements of herself in her work, topics of broad social significance, such as economic and racial inequalities, were equally important. Although fundamental to the artist during the entirety of her career, these concerns were magnified when she moved to Mexico in 1946. There she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a printmaking collective motivated by the political and human-rights issues of the Mexican Revolution. Many of Catlett’s linocuts and lithographs from this time provide a pan-American view of the working classes, the impoverished, and the dispossessed—elevated to a heroic scale that conveys great dignity and stature." (source)

Henry Ossawa Tanner 

"In 1895, Tanner painted Daniel in the Lion’s Den, which won an honorable mention in the Paris Salon the same year. Two years later he completed Resurrection of Lazarus, which so impressed Rodman Wanamaker, a Philadelphia merchant in Paris, that he decided to finance the first of Tanner’s several trips to the Holy Land. Before leaving, Tanner sent his Resurrection of Lazarus to the Paris Salon where it was awarded a third class medal and was purchased by the French government for exhibition at the Luxembourg Gallery and eventually entered the collection of the Louvre.

Spurred by his newly found acclaim, Tanner visited Philadelphia for several months in 1893. The visit, however, convinced him that he could not fight racial prejudice. Tanner returned to Paris and focused on painting religious subjects and landscapes. In 1899 Tanner married Jessie Olssen, a white opera singer from San Francisco, whom he had met in Paris. The couple’s only child, Jesse Ossawa, was born in New York in 1903. Their marriage may have influenced Tanner’s decision to settle permanently in France, where the family divided its time between Paris and a farm near Étaples in Normandy. "(source)

Kerry James Marshall

"Born in Birmingham at the start of the American civil rights movement, and later moving to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles just a few years before the Watts riots, Marshall’s work is inspired by his own personal history as well as what he interprets to be recurring elements of the American experience, both past and present.”
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"In 2018, as part of the 57th Carnegie International, Marshall revisited his 1999 comic book series, Rythm Mastr, in which he depicted exclusively Black superheroes in response to the lack of independent Black characters represented in the Marvel comics he read as a child. Through his work, Marshall has helped correct what he has called the “lack in the image bank” of Black subjects, and has reshaped the artistic canon."  (source)