In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights of Women as well as Negroes, from “The Negro Woman” series

Elizabeth Catlett

1947 · Linocut · Modern and Contemporary Art

This print is sixth in a series of fifteen linoleum cuts that Catlett created to commemorate Black women’s labor and to honor renowned heroines. Born Isabella Baumfree to an enslaved family in nineteenth-century Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth became an influential antislavery activist, memoirist, and feminist. Catlett shows her as a commanding figure, filling the picture plane, who stares out toward the viewer with a penetrating gaze. Truth’s strong, somewhat oversized hands—one points heavenward while the other rests next to a Bible—testify to her faith and commitment to the cause of abolition. One senses the artist’s own hand at work in the deep, direct incising of lines that characterizes her printmaking technique.

Artist

Elizabeth Catlett

Date

1947

Medium

Linocut

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 1999