Singing Their Songs

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Singing Their Songs

Artist Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915-2012)

Date1992

Dimensions22 3/4 x 18 3/4 in. (57.8 x 47.6 cm)

MediumColor lithograph

ClassificationPrints

Credit LineGift of Dr. Elizabeth Catlett

Object number

2006.162A

Not on View

Label TextIn 1992 Elizabeth Catlett published a portfolio of 10 color lithographs with the Limited Editions Club, New York, based on a 1937 poem of the same title by Margaret Walker (1915–1998). Walker was one of the most talented poets to come out of the American South and one of the most powerful voices of America. “When she speaks of and for her people, older voices are mixed with hers—the voices of Methodist forebears and preachers who preached the Word, the anonymous voices of many who lived and were forgotten and yet out of bondage and hope made a lasting music,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benet. Singing Their Songs corresponds to the stanza: For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and their jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power …Exhibition History

Toledo Museum of Art, Speaking Out: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, June 15 - September 23, 2007.

Toledo Museum of Art, People Get Ready: 50 Years of Civil Rights, June 27-September 21, 2014.