http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25galleries.html
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 24, 2009
EMORY DOUGLAS
'Black Panther'
The New Museum
235 Bowery, at Prince Street
Lower East Side
Through Oct. 18
James Baldwin wrote that "artists are here to disturb the peace." He
might have added that the artist's job is also to create peace in the
midst of disturbance. Both sides of the picture apply to the work of
Emory Douglas, who from the late 1960s to the late '70s was minister
of culture in the Black Panther Party and its official revolutionary artist.
In these roles, he not only designed and illustrated the party's
weekly newspaper but also created a wide range of political posters,
broadsides and promotional cards in a vigorously resourceful,
eye-zapping graphic style. In 2007 a younger California
artist-activist, Sam Durant, organized a survey of Mr. Douglas's work
for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and now that show,
reconceived by Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie, is at the New Museum.
Mr. Douglas joined the Black Panthers in 1967 after studying
commercial art at City College of San Francisco. He began designing
the newspaper with its second issue, and his illustrations for it
were a direct response to the party's early experiences of harassment
and civic conflict. He invented the visual symbol of the porcine
police officer that became a Black Panther signature. His 1960s
drawings were done fast and loose, and they still carry the heat of
the perilous events, the political ardors and the pressure-cooker
deadlines that produced them.
Later, as he turned to promoting the party's social programs
providing free food and free clothing in black neighborhoods his
work become more deliberate and polished, with single, powerful
figures drawn in thick black outline against a patterned ground, with
terse captions placed above or below. Drawing on American art of the
1930s, contemporary cartooning and Socialist Realism from Cuba,
Vietnam and elsewhere, his work was geared toward delivering
unequivocal messages in forms that either jumped off the newspaper
page or could be easily read from afar, taped in a window or pasted on a wall.
It's hard to convey that kind of immediacy in a museum setting, where
art almost automatically turns into artifact. And the New Museum
compounds the difficulty by presenting Mr. Douglas's work in
reverential, precious-object terms, with newspapers and posters
neatly arranged in a few vitrines sparsely distributed over a big
space. The approach is classic white-box pure and a good example of
how operating by the modernist letter can tamp down the art spirit.
But spirit comes through anyway. Mr. Douglas's works were meant to be
in your face and in your gut, and they are, irrepressibly. His early
images are shockers and utterly appropriate, on-the-spot responses to
a shocking time, when a group of disenfranchised citizens under
assault was trying to carve out a pacific and protected place for itself.
If Mr. Douglas's work from the mid-1970s tends to be milder in tone
and more internationalist in focus, the issues it tackles poverty,
war, health care, corporate rapacity are as immediate now as then.
So it's a very good thing he is still hard at work. Under the
auspices of the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the
Groundswell Community Mural Project, he recently collaborated with a
team of New York City teenagers to produce an outdoor mural at 122nd
Street and Third Avenue in Harlem. The painting is lively; it's
soaked in Black Power history; it's permanent; and it's called "What
We Want, What We Believe ."
...
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