Principled expression
In the intimate gallery at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, a powerful new exhibition offers viewers a sense of despair, and hope. “DIGAME: Elizabeth Catlett’s Forever Love” features work by 96-year-old artist Elizabeth Catlett. The show is on view in the Rudenstine Gallery through May 26. Many of the images portray African-American women and men caught in a world of racial, social, and economic injustice. A linocut from Catlett’s “The Black Woman” series created in 1946 and 1947 depicts African Americans riding in a bus behind a “colored only” sign. The piece is titled “I Have Special Reservations.” But in what might be the exhibition’s most iconic work, “Sharecropper,” a female farmer, her face worn by the elements and years of toil, carries an expression that has been described as both “determined and commanding.” A sculptor and graphic artist, Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915. She...