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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet set high standards—for herself, for art, and for America. Her show’s very title sounds unrelenting, and her chosen medium looks unyielding as well.

“I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the Brooklyn Museum proclaims, and she offers nothing as malleable as clay. The museum sets out a shelf of her tools, through July 13, and one can feel them cutting into hard and soft wood alike. Her subjects, like a Congolese and a Cossack, look unforgiving as well. Do not be surprised if they turn out to resemble the artist.

Her very name puts those who encounter her on the spot. It is too late to change what an Old Testament prophet has seen. Her work looks like nothing so much as the chronicle in wood by Elizabeth Catlett at the Brooklyn Museum just months before. All it lacks is the knockout punch from Catlett’s larger than life wood fist. While Catlett lived to see the civil rights movement and had relatives who knew slavery, Prophet’s time on earth, from her birth in 1890, pretty much coincides with a history of modern art. Now if only it felt as free.

Her sculpture stands in one long line at the center of the room, and the museum gives her a time line as well, all but devoid of incident. Mostly she went to the Rhode Island School of Design (or RISD) and made art. She is, though, is not so easy to pin down. Just by gathering her sculpture into a collective history, the display literally takes them off their pedestals. Watercolors render nature sparely, in casual loops, with soft colors for architecture—and one set of towers sways in the wind. Like it or not, it bends more than an inch.

If she ever drew a line in the sand, she stepped right over it. Her busts are not just women, not even close. Like the Cossack, they are also not just black. Their anonymous faces have a particular debt to classical art. In her hands, it becomes be hard to tell the cloaks of ancient Roman statuary from a woman’s dress. Faces are themselves of uncertain ancestry and race, and titles speak of poverty and youth.

Are they gods, emperors, or African American labor? For Prophet, the categories run together, and African Americans have earned their place in history. Domestic labor and everyday human connections bring her closer to the gods. She was herself of mixed ancestry, with a black mother and Native American father, and the show identifies her as (ready?) Afro Indigenous. The closer her busts come to self-portraits, the lighter their hair. The more, too, they resemble masks.

She took an interest in diversity in her life as well. She taught at Spelman, the historically black college in Atlanta, and went to Paris to see art. Critics associate her with the “New Negro” movement, a coinage by Alain Locke, theorist of the Harlem Renaissance. That tight row of sculpture brings out the breadth an contradictions of race in America. All face out, in one direction or other, with much the curled lips and firm stares. They have the room outside Judy Chicago and her Dinner Party, an icon of feminism with its own love of goddesses.

Prophet changed the spelling of her name from Profitt to take responsibility for what she saw, with cause for outrage along with pride and hope. Has she entered history, or can she return to a sideline that Modernism had outgrown? For William Butler Yeats, art always takes the long view. “Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, / And all the drop scenes drop at once / Upon a hundred thousand stages, / It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” It may yet, though, bend an inch.

Elizabeth Catlett found her subject early and never let her go. It allowed her art to span a tumultuous century and then some. It made her “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” at the Brooklyn Museum through January 19. Late in a groundbreaking career, Jacob Lawrence and his Builders poured a comparable empathy and energy into the black male—and I work this together with my recent report on him as a longer review and my latest upload.

Catlett was warm in her feelings but relentless. Her work on The Negro Woman, later renamed The Black Woman, takes up the entirety of an awkward but impressive gallery. She hammers it home to her own heart in cedar and in oil, starting in 1942, before releasing it as fifteen prints the next year. Side galleries show her as a student at Howard University at just seventeen and a teacher in New Orleans, but her style and her command are in place. Portrait heads to each side range to leading figures in black history, men and women, but they seem like an extension of the same capacious series. She lived until 2012, but one might easily think that her career lasted just five years.

So when did she find herself? It could have been as a student, already skilled in drawing. In her training, as in her subject matter, Catlett left nothing to chance. It could have been as jobs and education took her to so much of North and South—including New York, where she exhibited in a 1943 show of “Young Negro Art” at MoMA along with Charles White, just in time for the Harlem Renaissance. It could have been in exposure to other artists as well. Barbara Hepworth and William Zorach showed her the blunt impact of sculpture as little more than a block of wood. Käthe Kollwitz, Grant Wood, and Pablo Picasso showed her painting as personal, populist, and “the primitive.”

It could have been as a child in Washington, D.C., born in Freedman’s hospital to a family that had known slavery. She observed women in all their strength, but the restrictions that they faced as well. Her 1943 series includes a sharecropper and a woman scrubbing floors, as I Have Always Worked Hard in America. Yet it also includes a woman behind a barbed-wire fence, as My Reward Has Been Bars. Mostly, though, she depicts anonymous women, facing ahead or looking upward for something more. They are portraits not of individuals, but of determination. Catlett is always accusing, but never short of hope.

Or maybe she found herself as a young woman just by looking in a mirror. She decided she had what it took, and that was that. Still, she approached her students as collaborators, hanging salon style the portraits from history. She embraced the cause of black women, but also of worker’s rights. No wonder she headed in 1946 for Mexico, where the revolution promised socialism and the Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People) did its best to deliver. She stayed until a comparable activism and popular spirit in the 1960s came to the United States.

At least she thought so, and her career took a new turn at last. Those first rooms surround The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and have often hosted art by black women, including Beverly Buchanan and Lorraine O’Grady. Yet the show continues past twin doors with an artist in her fifties in support of civil rights and the Black Panthers alike. Catlett’s prints adapt easily to posters and her carvings to standing figures or a fist. She adopted linocuts long before for the jagged outlines of woodcuts and the ease of freehand drawing. As curators, Dalila Scruggs, Catherine Morris, and Mary Lee Corlett place them around a large platform for sculpture.

In truth, “all that it implies” may not be very much, but it could well be enough. The Black Woman gives the show its drive and its place in the history books. The coda loosens things up. When another sculpture, a family, floats overhead, Catlett might almost be having fun. Still, some things never change. With a self-portrait on paper in 1999, she is still facing front.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.