Eldzier Cortor (Richmond, Virginia, 1916 – Chicago, 2015) was an American painter and printmaker whose work shows Black women and communities through elongated figures and distorted perspective, drawing on both traditional African sculpture and European surrealism. His career spanned nearly a century, making him a significant figure in twentieth-century African American art.
Raised on Chicago's South Side by a family that was part of the Great Migration from the South, he trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1936. Studying African sculptures shown at the Field Museum changed his painting. In the 1940s he worked for the Works Progress Administration, recording everyday life in Bronzeville, and in 1944 and 1945 he won Julius Rosenwald Fellowships that took him to the Sea Islands off Georgia and South Carolina, where he spent about two years immersed in Gullah culture.
His best-known work, Southern Gate (1942-43), shows a nude woman standing firm amid ruins and storm clouds. In The Room No. VI (1948) he used thin, elongated bodies to depict poverty in Bronzeville homes without exploiting it. From the 1950s he drew more on the cylindrical, graceful limbs of African sculpture, as in Dance Composition No. 31 (1978), which reflects his time with the Gullah people.
Cortor is considered one of the first African American artists to make the Black woman the central theme of his work, and his treatment of women has drawn critical debate. His legacy lies in presenting the dignity and strength of Black communities through a distinctive formal language.