I have Paid a Price for my Commitment

Sep 27

I have Paid a Price for my Commitment, a powerful quote by revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett is now a Transformative Arts exhibition highlighting Catlett’s influences on artists who employ visual language as world building praxis. The artists featured in the exhibition are border crossers, disruptors, and practitioners of maternal care and Black and Brown ecologies visualizing a complex yet accessible iconography that prioritizes communities. Object List

Included in the exhibition are Catlett’s students and collaborators on both sides of the US/Mexico border: Samella Lewis and Armando Ortega, as well as artists directly influenced by her life’s work – Silvia Tinoco, Alison Saar and Dale Davis. These lineages are exemplary of the skill and creativity Catlett fostered in every relationship/mentorship she cultivated, shaping aesthetic language and form from liminality and muted histories. She stitched together this life through acts that assembled her communities and her strengths into a mechanism for the greater good.

Elizabeth Catlett embodied the ontological complexities that both forced and enabled her fugitivity. Raised in a Black Radical tradition that operated on both sides of DuBois’ veil, the border, colonialism and the white male gaze, she expanded this beingness with a dedication and fullness. She tended to her children, colleagues, students and friends with fierce maternalism, making space with language and meaning and a powerful materiality that held those spaces open for those who believed that art’s purpose is a counter-narrative to normativity and institutional harm.

I have Paid a Price for my Commitment describes Catlett’s insistence that the people she worked with fully inhabit the worlds from which they came as armor to survive the worlds where art was and is consumed as capital. Traditions, knowledges and histories are tangible matter that structure the mind and making, and Catlett amalgamated these beliefs into a singular yet collaborative practice that relied on creating from the conjunctures of those self-referential landscapes.

Catlett also was a conduit for women’s stories that were tangential to her experiences but were not her own. Artists in this exhibition come from diverse backgrounds, many are immigrants who work with transgressive visual language born from movement to give voice to those whose stories are marginalized. These artists embrace cultural, ritual, ethereal and aesthetic knowledges that transcend geographies and otherness to unite us in the practice of storytelling as care.

I have Paid a Price for my Commitment features Samella Lewis’ final painting. This unfinished work exemplifies describes the boundlessness of her legacy and Catlett’s lineage through arts and the community. Their journey and ours does not end, but is reimagined through artists, scholars and community engagement inspired by and in the spirt of Lewis and Catlett’s vision for the arts. Following this encouraging path forged by revolutionary Black women, this exhibition marks moniz’s final exhibition at the downtown Los Angeles space to begin new programs where she believes they are needed most.

I have Paid a Price for my Commitment opens Friday September 15 and runs until October 29 with programming to be announced.