NEW YORK, NY.- They didn’t have Zoom back in 1970, so when Elizabeth Catlett was denied entry into the United States to address a conference of the Black Arts Movement — for which she was a leading inspiration, a kind of luminary in exile — she had to deliver her speech by telephone.

The government had stripped Catlett of her citizenship eight years earlier, deeming her an undesirable alien after she became a Mexican citizen in 1962 and following years of surveillance for her leftist politics in both countries. But this hardly chilled her drive. In Mexico City, where she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she worked with local feminist groups while hosting a stream of American visitors and receiving by mail the newspaper of the Black Panther Party.

She made some of her most famous art — responding to and refining popular iconography — during this time. The warm-toned cedar sculpture “Black Unity” (1968) depicts a fist from one side and two stylized faces in the manner of African masks, side by side, on the other. The bronze “Target Practice” (1970), made soon after the deaths of Black Panther activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Chicago police raid, shows the bust of a Black man who stoically faces the viewer through a rifle’s crosshairs centered on his face.

These and other works, including her linocut prints and lithographs celebrating Malcolm X, Angela Davis or the Black communities that rose up in protest from Watts to Newark, New Jersey, crossed the border — shipped by her dealers or hand-carried by friends — and soon entered the zeitgeist. If her advocacy made her such a threat that her country of birth refused to admit her, Catlett told the conference by phone, “I hope I have earned that honor. For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be, a Black Revolutionary Artist, and all that it implies!”

This self-description and credo is the title of an expansive and exhilarating retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum that traces the remarkable life and career of the artist and activist, who died in 2012 at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at 96. “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” places her radical politics front and center.

That’s an act of welcome clarity by its curators — Dalila Scruggs, of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, of the Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, with the curatorial assistants Rashieda Witter and Carla Forbes. (The exhibition will travel to the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago.) There are other ways to frame Catlett — for instance, that she never got her due from the mainstream art world, which isn’t false — but the organizers go to the essence, focusing without euphemism on her mission as she understood it.

Her politics and aesthetics crystallized in specific social settings, including Howard University, the cathedral of Black learning in her hometown, Washington, D.C., where the art program was erudite and cosmopolitan. Others were the bubbling Black artistic and political circles of Harlem and Chicago’s South Side in the early 1940s. And in Mexico City, she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Art Workshop) in 1946, espousing its collective ethos and engagement with social issues.

One force of this exhibition, which includes more than 160 works along with abundant documentation, is how it presents Catlett as a lifelong seeker who traveled extensively and expanded her subject matter and techniques — editorial cartoons, allegorical sculpture, color lithographs — to address issues of the day.

For Catlett, the work was good only if it connected — if it met the people where they lived, and spurred dignity and inspiration. She could produce social realism and even propaganda: hills crested with oil wells, scary soldiers, sharecroppers standing tall in the field. But she was also a formalist who earned one of the earliest Master of Fine Arts degrees at the University of Iowa, where regionalist painter Grant Wood was a mentor. For a time in New York, she studied privately with Russian French cubist Ossip Zadkine.

The crackling tension in her art is where populist symbolism meets the visual tactics of abstraction — for instance, in “Homage to My Young Black Sisters” (1968), a streamlined cedar statue with a gap in its torso and its face raised skyward, its traits partly outlined. Across her work, we get eyes and fists raised, mothers cradling children, portrayals of heroes like Sojourner Truth or Frederick Douglass; but also sharp angles, volumetric contrasts, eerie negative spaces.

Some of Catlett’s early paintings feel mannered; some late color lithographs from the 1990s are hit-and-miss. But she abhorred mediocrity, especially in herself. After completing a statue of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans in 1976, she could barely look at the result, convinced that she had given in to the middlebrow pressures of the commission. Her later public art had more edge, including her memorial to writer Ralph Ellison, dedicated in 2003 on Riverside Drive in uptown Manhattan — a tall rectangular slab of bronze and granite with a cutout silhouette, befitting the author of “Invisible Man.”

Catlett’s biography is a chronicle of the country and the century. She was born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of teachers, though she did not know her father, who died just before she was born. Her grandparents were born enslaved in Virginia and North Carolina; she lived into the Obama administration.

Catlett headed the art department at Dillard University in New Orleans in her late 20s, and taught at the George Washington Carver community school in Harlem, a progressive adult-education experiment in the mid-1940s, where her courses included sculpture and dressmaking. By the early 1940s, her art appeared in group shows alongside Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Beauford Delaney. Her brief first marriage was to artist Charles White.

The exhibition is not perfectly chronological. It opens by plunging us right into the pivotal moment in Catlett’s creative and private life, in 1946 and 1947. During that time Catlett moved to Mexico — at first temporarily, to work with the printmakers and other artists around the Taller, and ultimately staying. She learned to make linocut prints and produced a classic series, “The Black Woman,” 15 depictions of allegorical or historical African American women — farmers, domestic workers, teachers and organizers — with an accompanying 15-line poem.

Living on a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, which supported Black artists and writers, she produced in Mexico sculptures and paintings on the same theme. She finalized her divorce with White and married painter Francisco Mora, who became her lifelong companion. The first of their three sons was born in 1947, weeks before she presented her first solo exhibition, at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, D.C., a pioneering Black-owned gallery with ties to the Howard faculty.

The first room of the Brooklyn exhibition more or less reassembles this show — which was prosaically titled “Paintings, Sculptures and Prints of the Negro Woman” — and supplements it with original exhibition brochures and other documents, before flashing back to her early years and then forward. It’s an effective strategy that delivers narrative tension and presents the artist as dynamic, both experiencing and instigating big changes.

How did she come to this point? Drawings and watercolors from her Howard undergraduate years — some signed “A. Catlett,” for Alice, her first name — and ephemera from that period convey an engaging picture of a gifted and sociable student who joined art and literature clubs and the service-oriented Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Some key early work from her Iowa years remains unlocated, however, including her master’s sculpture, a limestone mother-and-child piece, which won first prize at a national Black art exhibition in Chicago in 1940; you can browse a facsimile of her thesis statement on a tablet in the Brooklyn show.

As for what happened after 1947, it’s majestic. While her sons were young, Catlett worked mainly in the print shop; one gallery shows how her style adopted and extended the Taller’s language, visually and ideologically linking its concerns for Mexican campesinos and workers with Black sharecroppers, showing how systems of oppression overflow national borders. But it’s her later sculpture that dazzles — especially a platform on which we find some 13 works, mostly busts and torsos produced at varying scales, made between the 1960s and 1990s. Her material range was exceptional: cedar, mahogany, terra-cotta, bronze, limestone, marble, onyx.

Mexico transformed Catlett. She never regretted settling there and raised her sons to become artists and musicians, well beyond American racial discrimination. Her relationship with Mora, who died in 2002, was loving, respectful and affectionately teasing, as shown in grainy documentaries within the exhibition that are well worth your time.

The United States eventually relented. In 1971, the year after her speech-by-phone, she was finally allowed back in, thanks to the efforts of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was staging an exhibition of her prints and sculpture that traveled to some 10 Black colleges. She could visit and exhibit freely after that, but her citizenship was not restored until 2002.

Was she overlooked? It depends how you measure it. Certainly she went for long stretches without major U.S. shows or commercial visibility, but she had little affection for the marketplace and its signals and incentives. In any case, Black artistic networks never forgot her. They made pilgrimages to Mexico and showed her work back home. A jubilant photograph from 1974, when Linda Goode Bryant opened Just Above Midtown, her transformative Black avant-garde gallery, shows a clutch of young artists and curators, including Goode Bryant and David Hammons, around Catlett’s “Homage to My Young Black Sisters” (1968).

They understood the stakes. “Her dedication to Black pride, revolutionary change and artistic rigor were not inevitabilities, but born of a series of dogged, hard-nosed and impassioned choices,” Scruggs writes in the catalog. “We can take no part of it for granted.”

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‘Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All that It Implies’

Through Jan. 19, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.