The High-quality Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) just lately acquired a bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr by the late artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). Titled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and created in 1984-85, the sculpture will probably be on public show for the primary time ever on the de Younger Museum starting 18 January, two days earlier than this 12 months’s Martin Luther King Jr Day, a US federal vacation.
“Elizabeth Catlett is among the many most consequential American artists of the twentieth century, whose groundbreaking sculptures and prints bear witness to her lifelong advocacy for Black People and different traditionally marginalised communities,” Thomas P. Campbell, the director and chief govt of FAMSF, stated in a press release. “The bust encompasses a captivating historical past that can considerably broaden our capability to talk to Dr King’s enduring impression on American life, and the politics concerned in how he has been memorialised in public artwork.”
Albeit primarily an artist, Catlett was a Civil Rights chief in her personal proper. Her protests (and alleged hyperlinks to communism) led her to be declared an “undesirable alien” by the US authorities after she moved to Mexico. This regardless that she was born in Washington, DC—her grandparents had been enslaved.
Catlett made the King bust for a Nationwide Endowment for the Arts competitors that will see a sculpture commemorating King positioned within the rotunda on the US Capitol, the primary portrait of a Black particular person in a federal constructing. She was one in all three finalists, and though her work was drastically appreciated by the judges, Catlett finally misplaced to the Boston artist John Wilson, whose work remains to be on view contained in the rotunda.
Catlett’s King sculpture was beforehand owned by Reverend Douglas E. Moore and Doris Hughes-Moore. Moore, who organised one of many first sit-ins of the Civil Rights period, was King’s classmate at Boston College within the early Nineteen Fifties.
That is the third Catlett work acquired by FAMSF. The opposite two are the 1947 linoleum print I’m Sojourner Fact, I Fought for the Rights of Girls, as Effectively as Blacks and the 2000 mahogany sculpture Stepping Out. King’s bust will probably be fittingly positioned close to the Jack Levine 1963 portray Birmingham ’63, which commemorates the essential protests that King and others led in Alabama that 12 months.
