Mastering the Media

Often, sculptors find a material they enjoy working with, such as wood, stone, or metal, and stick with it. Not Elizabeth Catlett. She enjoys the challenge of working in a variety of media. Sometimes, she’ll even create a series featuring the same sculpture in several materials. She is interested in how using different materials changes the form.

Catlett wants all people—not just museum visitors and art collectors—to have access to her work. That’s why she has created several works of public art. “Art belongs to everyone,” she says.

She created the bronze low-relief public sculpture People of Atlanta (top of page), to be installed in Atlanta’s City Hall. A low-relief sculpture is two-dimensional, with images raised slightly from the background. To make it, Catlett carved each panel in plaster, made a mold of it, and cast it in bronze.

Catlett wanted this monumental (very large-scale) sculpture to reflect the diversity of the people of Atlanta. It features dozens of overlapping figures against a cityscape background. Catlett says these people represent “young, old, black, white, Asian, Latin, men, women, children.” 

One of Catlett’s public art sculptures has special meaning for the artist. It is a monument to American novelist Ralph Ellison. He wrote the 1952 book Invisible Man. The narrator of the book is an African-American man who feels invisible in a world that favors white people. He says, “When they [white people] approach me they see only my surroundings . . . everything and anything except me.”

In this flat-plane sculpture, Catlett cleverly interprets this passage by juxtaposing positive and negative space. Visitors look through the cutout silhouette of a man and view the New York City park where the piece stands, but not the man himself—he’s invisible. Catlett says she wanted to create the piece because “all of us feel invisible at one time or another.” Do you agree with her statement? Have you ever felt invisible? Catlett has. She says, “As a black woman sculptor, I have also been invisible.”