This monograph covers a fifty-year period from 1946-1996 in the life's work of the renowned African-American artist Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett was born and raised in Washington, DC. She received her B.A. in painting from Howard University in Washington and her M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Iowa.

From the beginning of her career as an artist and a teacher in the early 1940s, Catlett's themes have reflected her concerns for social injustice, the human condition, and her life as an African-American woman and mother. Formally, her sculpture draws upon African and pre-Columbian traditions, as well as early modernism in Europe, the United States and Mexico. For a period of twenty years Catlett was involved with the Taller de Grafica Popular, a collaborative print-making workshop that addressed the concerns of working people.

She has exhibited her work internationally and it is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City, among many others.