The granddaughter of slaves, Elizabeth Catlett was born into a middle-class Washington, D.C. family on April 15, 1915. She attended Howard University, and was the first to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Iowa. Her sculptures and prints celebrate not only famous African Americans like Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, but also anonymous workers, as in "Negro Woman," "Sharecropper" and "Survivor." Catlett died on ​April 2, 2012, at the age of 96, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.