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

Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican
1947
Not on view
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.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights of Women as well as Negroes, from “The Negro Woman” series
  • Artist: Elizabeth Catlett (American and Mexican, Washington, D.C. 1915–2012 Cuernavaca)
  • Date: 1947
  • Medium: Linocut
  • Dimensions: 18 13/16 × 12 1/4 in. (47.8 × 31.1 cm)
  • Classification: Prints
  • Credit Line: Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 1999
  • Object Number: 1999.529.30
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

More Artwork

More Artwork
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I Have Always Worked Hard in America . . ., from “The Negro Woman” series, Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican, Linocut
I Have Always Worked Hard in America . . ., from “The Negro Woman” series
Elizabeth Catlett
1946
. . . In Other Folks’ Homes, from “The Negro Woman” series, Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican, Linocut
. . . In Other Folks’ Homes, from “The Negro Woman” series
Elizabeth Catlett
1946
. . . In the Fields, from “The Negro Woman” series , Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican, Linocut
. . . In the Fields, from “The Negro Woman” series 
Elizabeth Catlett
1947
My Reward Has Been Bars Between Me and the Rest of the Land, from “The Negro Woman” series, Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican, Linocut
My Reward Has Been Bars Between Me and the Rest of the Land, from “The Negro Woman” series
Elizabeth Catlett
1947
My Role Has Been Important in the Struggle to Organize the Unorganized, from “The Negro Woman” series, Elizabeth Catlett American and Mexican, Linocut
My Role Has Been Important in the Struggle to Organize the Unorganized, from “The Negro Woman” series
Elizabeth Catlett
1947

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