Blues

Elizabeth Catlett-Mora

Blues

Offset Lithograph

28 x 19 1/2 inches

Edition of 130

Published by Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia.

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The African American artist Elizabeth Catlett-Mora, who relocated to Mexico in 1947, used her art to challenge racial oppression in the US and Mexico. Catlett-Mora frequently returned to the theme of blues music as a form of social protest, rooted in the West African traditions of call-and-response that were brought by the enslaved. In Blues she created a vertical diptych with a mottled blue-violet background, a column of three sculptural heads on the left, and two rows of couples in mid-dance.
_{—Tatiana Reinoza, PhD, from All My Ancestors: The Spiritual in Afro-Latinx Art (2022) exhibition catalog}