Naima

Based on a smaller terracotta head that was completed in Elizabeth Catlett's studio, "Naima" depicts one of the artist's twin granddaughters during a summer visit to her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, when the girl was eighteen years of age. A quiet and classically inspired representation of a young woman, the bust is one and a half times life size. The eyes are inlaid with semiprecious stones in order to symbolically hint at what Catlett described as a "dramatic" personality. The precise incisions and clean lines recall the monumentalism of ancient Egyptian and African sculpture that reduced extraneous details into stylized, symbolic forms. An activist for the rights of women and racial and social equality, Catlett took up printmaking in the mid-1940s as a means to make political statements. While works on paper naturally lent themselves to telling narratives that could speak to the moment, Catlett turned to sculpture as something more durable and timeless. Working with natural materials, Catlett aims to match the surface texture to the meaning of the object. Polished to a high finish, the white-veined marble and dramatic hair wrapping convey both a sense of Naima's physical strength - she was training to be a dancer - and the proud lineage of her ancestors.