Emory Douglas essay

With a serious interest in journalism and my passion for art, it was only a matter of time before I stumbled upon Emory Douglas, the revolutionary artist. He was born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been a resident of California since 1951. He became the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in 1967, a role he held until the party disbanded in the early 1980s. During the Party’s active years he served as the art director overseeing the design and layout of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper.

Douglas's artistic talents and experience proved a powerful combination: his striking collages of photographs and his own drawings combined to create some of the era's most iconic images, like that of Newton with his signature beret and large gun set against a background of a blood-red star, which could be found blanketing neighborhoods during the 12 years the paper existed.

The Black Panther Party newspaper covers were bold and graphic, using just black and one color, and either illustrated by Douglas himself or with high-contrast photographs.

Douglas was trained as a commercial artist at City College of San Francisco and has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. His work has also been in numerous exhibitions about the history of the Black Panther Party, including shows at the Arts & Culture Conference of the Black Panther Party in Atlanta, GA in 2008 and “The Black Panther Rank and File” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in 2006. Most recently his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Urbis, Manchester, UK in 2008-2009. In 2007, artist Sam Durant curated a solo exhibition of Douglas’ work at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas,” which is the inspiration for the presentation at the New Museum. The same year, Rizzoli published a book with the same title that included essays and interviews about Douglas’s work and his relationship to the Black Panther Party.

Douglas’s work has also been presented at the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Australia; the African American Art & Cultural Complex, San Francisco; Richmond Art Center, CA; and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston.

“If you’ve got art that’s helping people escape their problems, then you’re dealing with art that serves the interests of those who want to continue to oppress you… Art can be educational, it can show solidarity with others who are struggling. It can have a spirit of resistance or expose oppression and deal with institutions that don’t serve the community’s best interests.” — Emory Douglas