"I want to do large, public works," said Elizabeth Catlett in 1976, "I want public art to have meaning for Black people so they will have some art they can identify with."

That year, the artist presented the city of New Orleans with a massive, 10-foot bronze sculpture of Louis Armstrong as part of the year's bicentennial celebration.

"I've always wanted my art to service Black people," "to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential," said Catlett.

Catlett was born in 1919, in Washington, DC, and began exhibiting her penchant for art at an early age.

She was in high school, however, when she "first became aware of art as art," as she put it. After graduating, she applied to the Carniege Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study art, but she was denied because of her race.

Like many other blacks of her day with college aspirations, she applied to Howard University. In 1937, at the age of 18, she graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in art. She started graduate school two years later at the University of Iowa, where she found her creative niche. "I knew most about Black people," said Catlett, "that was when I began to focus seriously on black subject matter."

She became interested in sculpture while at Iowa, and in 1940, became the first person in the school's history to earn a master's degree in the field. Her thesis project, a marble sculpture of a mother holding a child, won first prize at the 1941 American Negro Exposition in Chicago.

After completing her degree, Catlett moved to New Orleans to head the art department at Dillard University, before moving two years later to Virginia, where she taught briefly at the Hampton Institute before moving on to New York City.

She arrived at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and developed a circle of friends that included many well-known black artists and writers such as Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.

While in New York, in 1944, during what she fondly remembers as "one of the greatest experience of my life," she taught dressmaking and sculpture to maids, cooks, janitors, and other working people at the George Washington Carver School, an experimental community school in Harlem.

In 1946, she moved to Mexico to study wood sculpture and pre-Colombian art.

Then, in 1958, she became the first woman professor at the National University of Mexico.

While in Mexico, Catlett continued to reach out to American blacks through her creations representing such subjects as Angela Davis, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X, and many other images of everyday black women, men and children in a wide variety of situations.

Today, she is considered by many to be the greatest African American sculptor.