"'Meet Mr. and Mrs. Charles White: An Interesting and Talented Combination'"

In the fall of 1942, the New York Amsterdam Star-News ran a profile on Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White with the headline, “Meet Mr. and Mrs. Charles White: An Interesting and Talented Combination.” The article portrayed the newlyweds as the rising stars of a new generation of African American artists. Less than five years later, however, White and Catlett had acrimoniously divorced. The fallout was more than personal: curators and historians have since treated their careers as largely independent. Yet for an intense period from 1941 to 1947 White and Catlett lived, worked, traveled, taught, and studied together, forging identities as “culture workers” engaged in the international class struggle. They taught at the progressive Workers’ Children’s Camp (Wo-Chi-Ca) and the George Washington Carver School. They showed together in groundbreaking exhibitions such as American Negro Art of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries (1941) and The Negro Artist Comes of Age (1945). Both earned Rosenwald Fellowships, allowing them to travel together throughout the U.S. South and to Mexico. In Mexico, they studied printmaking with members of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, producing topical lithographs on social justice themes. These formative experiences inspired the work they made, much of which shared formal and thematic characteristics. This paper will consider the early careers of Catlett and White as a collaborative process shaped by mutual interests, ideologies, and influences. I hope to recover what this “interesting and talented combination” yielded before the divergence of their personal (and art historical) narratives.