(born 1915), African American painter and sculptor. Catlett, whose grandparents had been slaves in North Carolina, was born on April 15, 1915, in Washington, D.C., to parents who were teachers. She won a scholarship examination to Pittsburgh's all-white Carnegie Institute of Technology. When she was refused entry because she was black, Catlett studied instead at Howard University. She graduated with honors in 1937. She went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa. Her work was exhibited widely throughout the United States and in foreign cities including Mexico City, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, Prague, and Havana. Catlett taught at several black colleges, but in 1946 she won a Rosenwald Fund fellowship and she studied in Mexico. She moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the 1950s and spent most of her life there. She created sculpture for spaces in Mexico City, New York, Washington, D.C., and Jackson, Miss., as well as such monuments as a bronze statue of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. She was strongly influenced by the civil-rights movement and dealt with economic, political, and social themes in her work. Catlett was recognized with many prizes and honors in the United States and in Mexico. In 1959 she became the first woman to head the sculpture department of the National School of Fine Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her works include ‘Woman Resting' (1981), ‘The Black Woman Speaks' (1970), ‘Mother and Child' (1972), and ‘Black Unity' (1968).