Charles White decided to become an artist after his mother bought him a painting kit at the age of seven. His first artistic break came when he was awarded a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he learned printmaking as well as drawing and painting, allowing him to work for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the difficult years of the Depression. In 1946, White traveled with his then wife, the artist Elizabeth Catlett, to Mexico City, where the two were invited to work at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a thriving workshop that had been issuing a steady stream of prints with a political thrust for almost a decade. There, White created “Black Sorrow” and a handful of haunting prints of melancholy beauty that conveyed the painful reality of contemporary African American life back in the United States. “Black Sorrow,” 1946, by Charles White © The Charles White Archives
