The Wonderful Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) not too long ago 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 might be on public show for the primary time ever on the de Younger Museum starting 18 January, two days earlier than this yr’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 Individuals and different traditionally marginalised communities,” Thomas P. Campbell, the director and chief government of FAMSF, stated in an announcement. “The bust encompasses a captivating historical past that may considerably broaden our potential to talk to Dr King’s enduring affect 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 might 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 among three finalists, and though her work was enormously 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 Ladies, as Effectively as Blacks and the 2000 mahogany sculpture Stepping Out. King’s bust might be fittingly positioned close to the Jack Levine 1963 portray Birmingham ’63, which commemorates the vital protests that King and others led in Alabama that yr.
