The revolution will be visualized: the compelling graphic designs of Emory Douglas, "Revolutionary Artist" of the Black Panther Party, helped shape the group's public image and reflected its evolution from politically militant to socially mitigating

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Sarah Valdez

Looking beyond the gallery scene, deeply rooted in his conviction that all art is political, and valuing real-life action and change above all else, Emory Douglas used his prodigious graphic skills as Minister of Culture and Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party from 1967, the year following its inception, through 1984, promoting the group's agenda of African-American self-determination, employment, decent housing, education, health care, land ownership, and an end to police brutality and war. Organized for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's Pacific Design Center by Sam Durant--L.A.-based artist, aficionado of the political upheavals of the late 1960s and of Douglas in particular--the exhibition "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas" took stock of the esthetically compelling, emotionally charged and still-relevant output of a man who forged spirited images of race relations (ordinary black people of all ages unrepentantly decimating greedy oppressors); clever and often quite morbidly funny renderings of the "Establishment"; illustrations of the plight of black people struggling to get by in the ghetto; posters calling for the freeing of such political prisoners as Angela Davis, Erika Huggins, Huey Newton and Kathleen Cleaver, who became so familiar they were popularly known on a first-name basis; and, ultimately, death notices of Panther luminaries like Bunchy Carter, Fred Hampton, Jon Huggins and Bobby Hutton, whose lives were cut short as tragically and inevitably as they had predicted for themselves.

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As a child in 1951, Douglas moved with his mother to San Francisco, where he still lives and works as a production artist for the Sun-Reporter, the city's oldest African-American newspaper. He progressed from a boy who liked to copy cartoons to a juvenile delinquent to a student of advertising art at City College of San Francisco with a keen social conscience. He encountered founding Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at a Black Arts Movement meeting at the very time they were in the process of launching The Black Panther (and the two masterminds were somewhat awkwardly trying to compose headlines with pencils). Douglas offered his skills, and quickly gained respect for his ability to seductively illustrate the party's platform with his signature chunky black lines and frequent use of pattern. In its early days, of course, the Panther program famously included armed self-defense. And indeed, in the Panthers' inaugural year, Douglas took to illustrating mothers with babies (that predictable pair onto which political values so often get projected) with guns as an immediate means of conveying Panther family values.

To this object lesson in protecting oneself from hostile forces (maybe the first time in U.S. history that blacks broadcast their intention to fight back against those who sought to exploit them), Douglas added magnificent textiles, elegant drapery and the power of a high-contrast, geometrically balanced composition. In one mother-and-child drawing, a woman facing away from the viewer carries a baby who looks back over her right shoulder, their jet-black skin so void of detail they might be read as symbols rather than individuals. Inky, leopard-like spots cover her shirt; a gray headscarf tied at the nape trails gracefully down her back. The child clutches a pistol in its hand, and the image gives pause either as a warning or a fact--scary or inspiring, debased or right on--depending on one's perspective.

In 1966, before he joined the party, Douglas produced another striking illustration of a black (again, utterly sable and featureless) woman with a baby on her hip and a shotgun strapped to her back; it was later used to promote a Panther fundraiser. Douglas, who signed his artworks simply "Emory," opted to portray a woman, again, as a caretaker with a keen fashion sensibility, evidenced by the richly illustrated patterns on her clothing. Standing in an optically pleasing contrapposto, she wears large, African-style hoop earrings, and even the sheath for her weapon has a nicely drawn wood-grain pattern. This representation of radical blacks nurturing their own was in stark contrast to the "official" view of them fashioned by the then-director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1967 had declared the Black Panthers the biggest threat to the country's internal security and had set COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), an extraordinarily well-funded, covert and ultimately illegal government agency, to infiltrate, sabotage and eliminate them.

Though Douglas has occasionally shown his work in galleries, his intended audience was always the inhabitants of the ghetto: namely black people who, especially in the Panthers' early days, had rarely if ever seen themselves publicly represented as other than variously disempowered caricatures. Indeed, to shed light on Douglas's opinion of the role of art in the Black Panther Party, we have a 1968 illustration of four lynched pigs (actual animals, not law enforcement!) identified with typewritten text as L.B.J. and members of his cabinet. (1) This spectacle is accompanied by a rare quote signed by the artist (usually the text accompanying Douglas's drawings came anonymously from the party's collective principles). It reads: "ON LANDSCAPE ART 'It is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother f--kin neck.'" Giving a talk titled "Art for the People's Sake" at Nashville's historically black Fisk University in 1972--a year after some would argue the Black Panther Party had met its demise with the East/West Coast split (2) (Douglas continued working with the West Coast faction)--Douglas exercised his skill for stating the obvious regarding the function of art in relation to the Panthers' agenda: "We cannot do this in an art gallery, because our people do not go to art galleries.... The [ruling class] perpetuate[s] the worst violence on planet Earth while they have us drawing pictures of flowers and butterflies."