Ricardo Levins Morales – Art for Environmental Justice 4 Favorite 

Based in Minnesota, Morales creates prints and posters that address environmental and social justice issues. His art is used in grassroots movements, combining vivid imagery with messages of resistance and hope.
“This is explicitly political art,” said Becca Lo Presti, assistant curator of the Mattatuck Museum, now showing Catlett's exhibition. “Because her works were so radical and she was so outspoken, she was banned from coming back to the United States,” from Mexico, where Catlett had moved in 1947. “She was labeled a communist. She supported Black liberation.”
Her bold, dynamic lithographs, linotypes and sculptures made Catlett (1915-2012) “one of the defining artists of the 20th century,” according to the National Gallery of Art, which is now exhibiting 150 of Catlett’s pieces. They include her iconic cedar sculpture of a clenched Black fist and her expressive “Survivor” linotype, a representation of a careworn-but-fierce Alabama farm worker, based on the Dorothea Lange photograph “Ex-slave with a Long Memory” (1937).
The Mattatuck’s exhibit is nowhere near that big — just 38 pieces, including three commanding sculptures — but it is a robust primer on the artist’s work and political activism. Organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions with support from Post University, the exhibit seems to come in the midst of a Catlett moment; in addition to the National Gallery show, she was the focus of a show at the Brooklyn Museum that ended Jan. 19. “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies," will include more than 200 Catlett works that, according to the museum, “gives this revolutionary artist and radical activist her due.”