Fifty Years Later,
Black Panthers’
Art Still Resonates
The Black Panther Party is often associated with armed resistance,
but one of the most potent weapons in its outreach was its artwork.
By ANGELICA MCKINLEY and GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOOCT. 15, 2016
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- how they were covered in our own pages.
The Black Panther Party is often associated with armed resistance, but one of the most potent weapons in its outreach to African-Americans in cities across the country was its artwork. In posters, pamphlets and its popular newspaper, The Black Panther, the party’s imagery was guided by the vision of Emory Douglas, its minister of culture.
His art came from many sources. As a teenager in San Francisco during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Douglas found himself incarcerated at the Youth Training School in Ontario, Calif., where he got involved with its printing shop. He went on to study graphic design at San Francisco City College, where he developed a deep interest in the Black Arts Movement, the artistic arm of the Black Power Movement.
Photo
Emory Douglas at work on The Black Panther newspaper.
His particular background, a combination of art, printmaking and activism, eventually attracted the eye of the Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, and led to Mr. Douglas’s becoming a central figure in the party. The newspaper’s circulation eventually climbed to over 200,000, making it one of the most popular black newspapers of its day. In the years since the party’s demise, Mr. Douglas’s posters have come to be known as iconic artifacts of their era.
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Mr. Douglas’s work is currently on display in an exhibition at Manhattan’s Urban Justice Center, and it remains a touchstone for many younger artists looking to marry their practice and their social consciousness. The painter Jordan Casteel, 27, an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, called Mr. Douglas’s work “a literal depiction and a visual representation of a time.”
“Art serves as a blueprint to be inspired by, but it’s also a language that continues on,” she said.
To create a conversation between the past and present, and to explore the relevance and importance of his Black Panthers artwork 50 years later, we interviewed Mr. Douglas, who is now retired but still creating art, traveling, and living in San Francisco, along with two young artists who often look to him for inspiration: Ms. Casteel and Fahamu Pecou, whose solo exhibition, “Black Matter Lives,” is on view at the Lyons Wier Gallery in Chelsea. Their comments below have been lightly edited for space and clarity.
War and Protest
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Emory Douglas: The reaction to my Vietnam War art then was positive. It was a message to the G.I.s and to the broader community that the abuses, murders and lynchings of people in our community was not caused by Vietnam or the Vietnamese. Our struggle was not in Vietnam, our fight was here in the United States. The tears in the image reflect the pain and suffering that I heard when I talked to people in the struggle, or in the military.
Jordan Casteel: This image of a black man crying challenges our perceptions of masculinity and strength in our community. It acknowledges black people fighting in a war but questioning, “What is our war? What battles should we be in? And how do we make those decisions? What war is ours? What does it mean to be in battle with your own country?” The evidence is there in the photos on the helmet: We are being killed in the streets here but also being asked to kill or be killed in another country. It is so jarring to me. It made me feel uncomfortable, but in all the right ways.
Fahamu Pecou: One of the major tenets of their agenda was to shape their own media image, as opposed to having their image be dominated by the more dominant media landscape. So coming up with the pamphlets and The Black Panther newspaper was all a part of that agenda: “If we wait for someone else to tell our story they’re going to paint a picture of us that doesn’t reflect our values, doesn’t reflect our agenda. So we have to lead the charge on what the Black Panther Party is about.” And that’s where these images really come from.
Powerful Women
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Emory Douglas: My daughter’s mother worked with me designing for The Black Panther newspaper. There was also Tarika Lewis, who was the first artist that worked with me on the newspaper as an artist. And then there were many other women who contributed to the production of the newspaper. The women depicted in my artwork are a reflection of the party. Women went to jail and were in leadership roles. Women started chapters and branches of the Black Panther Party as well. When we used to read some of the stories, you would see women in the Vietnam and Palestine struggle and in the African liberation movement. Women were an integral part of those movements so all that played into how I expressed them in my own artwork.
Fahamu Pecou: In my own work, I am often working from a position of changing the perspective that we as black people have about what we can do with our bodies, and what kind of power we actually possess. So, trying to move ourselves from a perception of ourselves as being victimized and rather seeing ourselves as being empowered, and being capable of making the changes that we want to see. And I think that that takes a great deal of work, to change the way people see themselves. When we have various atrocities that happen within the black community and to the black community, and we continue to survive, we continue to thrive — it brings you a reflection of the power that’s deep within us. So I’m interested in that idea: that we can change the way we move in the world by changing the way we think about and see ourselves in this society.
Jordan Casteel: Emory was working toward getting people information through his visual language, and that necessity was much more pungent at that time. Now information can just be turned over immediately. You can take a photograph, upload it to Instagram or Facebook and say, “This happened.” Then all of a sudden on social media, we are all chiming in to a visual language and trying to take a stance. Using graphic design and graphic imagery as a way to take a stance behind something is still a part of my generation.
