Emory Douglas at the New Museum

Paint It Black Panther:
Emory Douglas at the New Museum

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-08-25/art/paint-it-black-panther-emory-douglas-at-the-new-museum/

The LES hosts the work of a true revolutionary artist

By Martha Schwendener
August 25th 2009

It's 1967, and you're starting a newspaper for a grassroots
organization. Problem is, your readership isn't, as Bobby Seale puts
it, really "a reading community." How do you get the word out?

Along comes Emory Douglas, a self-professed former juvenile
delinquent who has been drawing since childhood and got directed to
art school. He has had some training in commercial art at the City
College of San Francisco, has worked in a print shop, and knows how
to do layout and paste-up. More important, he's into the message. A
great artist is born.

If you haven't heard of Douglas, that's because he hasn't been on the
radar in what artist Adrian Piper has called the "Euroethnic" (read:
predominately white) art world for long. In 2002, Los Angeles­based
Sam Durant, a white artist whose work often cites upheavals of the
1960s, asked Douglas to lecture in conjunction with one of his shows.
Durant subsequently put together a monograph and curated a show at
the MOCA Pacific Design Center in L.A., and now this one, the New
Museum's "Emory Douglas: Black Panther."

The other reason that Douglas isn't familiar is because he's an
example of something you hear about, but rarely encounter: a true
revolutionary artist. Douglas signed on as Revolutionary Artist of
the Black Panther Party and later became the Party's Minister of
Culture. The New Museum show covers Douglas's efforts from 1966 to
1977, when the paper, The Black Panther, ceased publication. But what
makes Douglas's work "revolutionary" is that it was first and
foremost about its connection with the community and the evolving
concerns of the Party rather than being a solely personal aesthetic agenda.

The spare offset lithographs hung on the wall and the editions of The
Black Panther housed in vitrines from the early days, 1966 and 1967,
show iconic images of Panthers in black berets, toting guns.
Throughout the show, it's stressed that the impetus for forming the
party was to protect the black community­initially of Oakland,
California­from police brutality. The Panthers were about defense
rather than offense­inspired by Malcolm X's decree, "By any means
necessary." Co-founder Huey Newton described the panther as an animal
that never attacks unprovoked, but "defends itself to death." (The
Party was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,
but the "self-defense" part was later dropped.)

Along with images that have the same bold, iconic quality as Alberto
Korda's photograph of Che Guevara, Douglas's other big contribution
to the language of '60s insurgency was to call the police "pigs." He
wasn't the first to do it, of course, but his images of hanging pigs,
pigs in police uniforms, and greedy imperialist pigs made a stunning
graphic representation.

In the late '60s and early '70s, the Party moved into its
social-program phase, and Douglas's images correspond with that.
Breakfast programs for children; shoe and clothing drives; rides for
people to visit family members in prison or for the elderly to pick
up their Social Security checks­Douglas provided accompanying images,
although the show at the New Museum focuses more on the cinematic
aspects of the Party, like the arrests and benefits to free
"political" prisoners. (Panthers stress that they won over 90 percent
of the cases brought to court.)

The Panthers didn't have much in the way of resources, and Douglas
wasn't equipped with an MFA or a circle of friends versed in art
theory. When pressed in an interview in the catalog, he provides one
name of an artist who influenced him: Charles White, who did the
illustrations for the calendar that his aunt got from her insurance
company. And yet, his work parallels 1920s Soviet constructivism,
German artists like John Heartfield and George Grosz, Mexican
painting and graphic artists like José Guadalupe Posada and Manuel
Manilla. (Durant also suggests affinities with black artists like
Ruth Waddy, Sargent Johnson, and Elizabeth Catlett.)

What's instructive about this show extends beyond the history lesson,
however­art history or otherwise. One striking element is the number
of women in Douglas's images, both high-profile Panthers like
Kathleen Cleaver and Ericka Huggins and ordinary grandmothers,
mothers, and working women. It's a potent reminder of why second-wave
feminism was deemed a "white women's" movement: For black women, men
were the partners in struggle, instead of the oppressors.

Similarly, what this show offers is an example of a different mode of
art-making, where a "career" might be imagined as something other
than one forged in a gallery or institutional setting. When asked if
he ever made his "own" work, Douglas replied that he didn't have any
time because he was "not only doing the art," but "also designing the
flyers, also designing booklets, banners for events." His work­there
were poster-centerfolds in many editions of the paper­was
wheat-pasted on walls and hung in people's kitchens and living rooms.
It's a stark contrast from, say, Ad Reinhardt, an engaged midcentury
artist whose political cartoons bear a striking resemblance to some
of Douglas's, but who kept his painting practice separate­and claimed
that art and politics should be kept apart.

Douglas's near invisibility in the mainstream art world can be
explained by the fact that art that's deemed "political" has been
effectively quarantined. The reigning art ideology in the '60s and
'70s was a formalism that rid art of referents to the "real" world.
In Douglas's work, the real world is evident everywhere, from Vietnam
to Algiers to Nixon to what's happening on the streets of Oakland.

Durant relates that Douglas seemed ambivalent about showing his work
in a museum context. No mystery there: Museums are notoriously good
at ridding art objects of sticky contextual references. This exhibit
makes selections that shape the context, but does a good job of
attempting to translate a holistic version of Douglas's vision. It
also brings us back to Douglas's work and the Panthers' original
raison d'être: racism. For, with all its left-leaning liberalism, the
art world is as racist as the rest of the culture. Galleries are
wastelands when it comes to exhibiting or employing people of color.

The Panthers' ultimate struggle transcended racism, however. It was
against oppression and capitalism and imperialism­spurred on by Marx
and Frantz Fanon. For all its lip service, the commercial art world
is funded by the classes skewered in Douglas's work. It's no wonder
why, after 30 years, Douglas is getting his first major museum showing.

.