Head (Head of a Man)

Elizabeth Catlett lived in Chicago in 1941, during which time she enrolled in a ceramics course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied lithography at the South Side Community Art Center. She also later recalled working on a stone carving, possibly this work. Carved from Indiana limestone, it displays a naturalistic approach to form and a keen attention to individual subjectivity. It demonstrates the subtle stylization Catlett had learned from her studies with the painter Grant Wood at the University of Iowa, but without the greater embrace of abstraction that she would develop in 1942 after studying African art.