Awards
2003 CWA Annual Recognition Awards
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will honor two outstanding women—the visual artists Elizabeth Catlett Mora and June Wayne—at its eighth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony at the American Folk Art Museum during the CAA Annual Conference in New York, which will take place on Friday, February 21, 2003, from 7:00 to 8:30 AM. Please join us in celebrating their amazing and continuing careers!
Elizabeth Catlett Mora
Elizabeth Catlett Mora (photograph by D. G. “Dori” Lemeh)
Elizabeth Catlett Mora, a sculptor, printmaker, feminist, and social and political activist, has dedicated her life to creating artwork that reflects her beliefs and experiences as an African American woman. Recipient of eight honorary doctorates and numerous artistic awards, Catlett’s distinguished career spans fifty years, during which she has worked in bronze, clay, wood, stone, serigraphy, and lithography. Galvanized into action by the civil rights, labor, and women’s movements, she fashioned such memorable sculptures as Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), The Black Woman Speaks (1970), and Target (1970). Additionally, Catlett created equally memorable prints such as Sharecropper (1968) and Black is Beautiful (1970) that underscore the tensions and racial divisions in America. The richness of her visual repertoire still remains vital today.
As an undergraduate at Howard University in Washington, DC, Catlett studied under the artist Lois Mailou Jones and the art historian and scholar James Porter. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she studied with Grant Wood. Later, Catlett honed her craft in Mexico with the artists Jose L. Ruiz and Francisco Zuniga and in New York with Ossip Zadkine. Significant solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, the New Orleans Museum of Art in Louisiana, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. Her work has been included in groundbreaking group exhibitions such as To Conserve a Legacy; In the Spirit of Resistance: African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School; Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox; Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists; 20th Century American Sculpture at the White House; Free within Ourselves: African American Art from the Museum’s Collections; African American Artists, 1880–1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection; Since the Harlem Renaissance: 50 Years of Afro-American Art; Forever Free: Art by African-American Women, 1862–1980; American Negro Art from the 19th and 20th Centuries; and The Art of the American Negro, 1851–1940. Her artwork can be found in numerous major museum collections in the US, Mexico, and at the Národního Muzea (National Museum) in Prague. Catlett is currently represented by the June Kelly Gallery in New York.
For Catlett’s exceptional artistic talent, her unwavering activism for the equality of African American, Latino, and Mexican people, her feminist efforts to uplift women, her personal triumph against injustice and adversity, her dedication to her students, and her devotion to her husband, the late artist Francisco Mora, and their three sons, CWA honors you.
June Wayne
June Wayne (photograph by Eleanor Dickinson)
June Wayne, a painter, printer, intellectual, and high school dropout, has received many awards, including five honorary doctorates. She was chosen Woman of the Year in 1999 by the Palm Springs Desert Museum in California and Woman of the Decade by Women in Business, and received a 1983 Midcareer Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, a Living Legacy award from the Women’s International Center in San Diego, California (which, she mentions, did not, alas, include a sock full of money), and numerous lifetime achievement awards during the last twenty years. Wayne was also nominated for an Oscar in 1974 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Four Stones for Kanemitsu, her documentary on the Tamarind Institute, which trains fine-art lithographers who, in turn, have created their own print shops across the country.
Wayne is widely associated with the art of lithography, having founded and directed the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now the Tamarind Institute), funded by the Ford Foundation, in 1960. At that time “master printers were extinct in the United States and were dying out in Europe.” With Garo Antreasian and Clinton Adams, Tamarind helped to produce The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), which is still the primary authority on that print medium. However, Wayne has always worked in many media; to her regret and the world’s loss, her tapestries and paintings are not as widely known as her prints.
Wayne’s exhibition history dates to 1935—she suggests that she won a lot of awards by wearing out the competition— and she garnered many prizes since then, including thirteen purchase awards from France’s Biennale d’Epinal, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Wayne has had some seventy-five solo exhibitions in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and the US. In recent years Wayne has had three major retrospectives at the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Palm Springs Desert Museum in California, and, in 1999, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her art is represented in more than sixty-three museum collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.
Wayne is no stranger to CAA, having delivered its Convocation address at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the 1990 Annual Conference in New York. She also has participated in numerous CAA panels and in 1973 delivered her influential, witty, and often-reprinted paper, “The Male Artist as a Stereotypical Female.” Wayne’s bibliography—more than one thousand entries in books, anthologies, catalogues, and journals—is an exhaustive compilation of her extensive writing, speaking, and persuasive activism.
Now in her mid-eighties and with several lifetimes of work behind her, the vibrant Wayne is quite uninterested in speaking of past achievements. She has recently become professor of research at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking and Paper in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she hopes to produce several new projects, one on the aurora borealis and another entitled Jimmy and June (featuring herself and the artist James Ensor). The third will be a Thomas Bros.–like map of D’nir Amat, a country of her own designing. She is also planning a takeoff on the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, to be called Les Très Riches Peches de la Duchesse de Tamarindo. Of course, her intense interest in the genetic code and language, her habit of pushing old classic materials to develop new complicated ideas and make credible inverted, introspective, and impulsive thoughts, and her interest in revisiting the conceptual and political problems of the 1940s and 1950s all drive Wayne’s art making. She says, “After all the work I did on optics and the genetic code, these projects will be a gas.”
For her never-ending passion to think, see, and teach, and for her dedication to removing all barriers to the free expression of all artists, CWA honors June Wayne.
—Dori Lemeh and Eleanor Dickinson, CWA members
