© 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York.

Emory Douglas, "Untitled" (ca. 1970). Offset lithograph, 13 x 15½ in.

December 2009 / January 2010 Reviews

Walead Beshty

Ed Flood

Dance with Camera

Born in the Streets: Graffiti

Kosho Ito

Fereydoun Ave

Hurvin Anderson

Romare Bearden George Grosz Court Tosses Nazi Painting Suit Against MoMA Editors’ Picks: Art Basel Miami Beach Preview The Pavilion Heats Up Fashion Photographer Irving Penn Has Died Mary Reid Kelley in New York Obama Appoints Three to Arts and Humanities Committee

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That the Black Panther Party, which J. Edgar Hoover once called "the greatest threat to the internal security of this country," had a minister of culture raises some vital questions about the relationships among art, the civil rights movement, and the rhetoric of terror in America. The minister in question was Emory Douglas, who before taking that post was the party’s chief illustrator. His drawings and collages documented and celebrated the Black Panthers’ wide-ranging activities, from their militant demonstrations and confrontations to organizing May Day rallies and community screening for sickle-cell anemia. Douglas’s work contains echoes of various strains of 20th-century modernism, including George Grosz’s searing caricatures, Romare Bearden’s collages, and the geometries of Russian Constructivist posters. One of his most powerful images is of Gerald Ford as a marionette controlled by a hand made of corporate logos against a backdrop of stock quotes.

Psychedelia and the vernacular of the ghetto also inform Douglas’s works in "Emory Douglas: Black Panther" at the New Museum. The artist’s posters not only depict African-Americans in striking, heavily outlined images but give them voice as well. "Afro-American solidarity with the oppressed people of the world," declares a 1969 poster in which a Black woman, at once stern and chic, defiantly brandishes a weapon. The insistence that Black people be responsible for their own liberation is an indication of the humiliation to which they were exposed and against which they were reacting, by whatever means necessary.

"Emory Douglas" originally appeared in the December 2009 / January 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2009 / January 2010 Table of Contents.