The Howard University Gallery of Art has loaned works by Elizabeth Catlett to She Speaks: Black Women Artists and the Power of Historical Memory, an exhibition opening February 7, 2026 at the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum.
The exhibition brings together Black women artists across two centuries to examine how historical memory is shaped, carried, and preserved through artistic practice. Catlett’s work anchors that framework. Her sculptures and prints center Black women’s presence, dignity, and structural truth, functioning as artistic expression and historical record.
Catlett was a sculptor and printmaker whose career engaged labor, civil rights, and collective struggle with clarity and purpose. Working primarily in sculpture and linoleum cuts, she developed a visual language grounded in strength, permanence, and political consciousness. Her work reflects lived experience across the United States and Mexico, where she spent much of her professional life, and where her practice deepened its international and diasporic perspective.
A Howard University alumna, Catlett developed her artistic foundation within the university’s intellectual and cultural environment. That connection gives the Gallery’s loan particular weight. The works lent to the exhibition, including Woman and Child (c. 1960) and Black Unity (c. 1968), underscore both Catlett’s artistic legacy and Howard’s long-standing role as a steward of Black cultural knowledge.
The Gallery’s participation reflects institutional authority rather than symbolic inclusion. By lending Catlett’s work, Howard extends its curatorial voice beyond campus while maintaining authorship over context and interpretation. It reinforces the position of historically Black institutions as primary custodians of Black cultural memory.
As museums continue to reassess how history is framed and who shapes that framing, She Speaks foregrounds the role Black women artists play in carrying historical memory forward. Elizabeth Catlett’s work holds that memory with intention and permanence, grounded in form, history, and purpose.
