Elizabeth Catlett's Floating Family
Public Art Program > Floating Family
Public Notice
The Legler Library Floating Family sculpture is being lent to a major exhibition about the artist, Elizabeth Catlett.
About the exhibition:
While Catlett’s contributions were recognized during her lifetime, particularly within important African American art communities in the United States as well as in Mexico, her adopted homeland, this exhibition will situate Elizabeth Catlett within multiple histories of modernism, affording her the attention she has yet to receive from the mainstream art world. From drawings made while she was an undergraduate student at Howard University and her early painting practice, to the public monumental sculptural commissions she executed late in her career, this exhibition will be the most definitive on the artist to date.
The exhibition will present more than six decades of history and offer a more nuanced understanding of the Mexican context for her Black Arts Movement work as well as Catlett’s transnational commitment to a feminism that prioritized family, civil rights struggles, and class realities. A close examination of her studio practice will show the centrality of printmaking in her art and activism.
Exhibit schedule:
- Brooklyn Museum: September 13, 2024 through January 19, 2025
- National Gallery: March 9 through July 6, 2025
- Art Institute of Chicago: August 30, 2025 to January 4, 2026
Legler Branch Library
115 S. Pulaski Rd.
Chicago, IL 60624
Artist Elizabeth Catlett carved each of these floating figures from a single Mexican primavera wood tree trunk. Arms and legs were carved separately from a third trunk and attached later. In much of her work, Catlett celebrates the beauty and dignity of African American women and motherhood. These figures could be interpreted as mother and child, drifting quietly, locked together by the touch of their hands.