[Statue] Elizabeth Catlett has absorbed lessons from African woodcarving and from pre-Columbian and Mexican stone and ceramic sculpture. Since the 1940s, she has concentrated on creating fairly abstract forms in her prints and sculptures.

Catlett considers the human face a key to racial identity and a record of human experience. Singing Head displays all these features with its sleek planes, abstract contours, and innate vitality.

Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art.

Singing Head, 1980, by Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1919), black Mexican marble

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