Black Panther - The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas

MOCA – Pacific Design Center;  21OCT-07 through 24 FEB-08

Like countless other east coast transplants to Los Angeles, the Christmas holidays used to mean ten days split between NYC and Boston, visiting family and friends.  As fate would have it, the last of our parent’s generation passed away around the same time that air travel went from tedious to unbearable.  So after many years of dutiful (and frequently enjoyable) trips home, we stopped these annual journeys six years ago.  In their place, we began the unusual family tradition of packing up the dogs, the gifts and ourselves and checking in to a Los Angeles westside hotel as an alternative to an authentic New England winter holiday.  There’s something about a busy urban hotel lobby, a great bar scene, and twenty four hour room service that almost passes for Christmas in Manhattan.   The hotel we have favored for these winter holidays happens to be located on the West Hollywood / Beverly Hills border, just a few blocks from the gargantuan Pacific Design Center.

One thing that doesn’t usually spring to mind when I remember Christmas past is the Black Panther Party.  By coincidence, I was halfway through “Will You Die with Me?” an easy read back through the history of the BPP as remembered by Flores Forbes, a San Diego youth who first joined the Party at only sixteen, and remained with them to their end more than a dozen years later.  Although I was already familiar with the more well known figures of the major radical movements from that period, Mr. Forbes’ book provided me with a much stronger background in the history of the Party and the players who shaped its destiny.  This proved particularly advantageous when viewing the current exhibit on display at the Pacific Design Center’s small outpost of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

‘Black Panther – the Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas’ is based around the format that Mr. Douglas is most famous for; the strikingly graphic illustrations that shouted out from the cover of the weekly BPP newspaper.  The exhibit also includes many prints of his celebrated posters from that period and numerous examples of what would best be characterized as editorial cartoons, smaller scale illustrations that ran inside almost every issue of the Party newspaper.

I’m no art critic and I won’t attempt to critique Mr. Douglas work from that point of view.  But as a media for communicating ideas, his powerful illustrations grab the viewer and almost force him to consider the issue at hand.  This is not art that can be analyzed from a technical perspective while disregarding the message; it’s impossible to consider matters of light and perspective when the focal point is aiming an AR-15 rifle.  While I enjoy and appreciate his artwork on a purely visual basis, this is art with a message that can not be ignored.

The exhibit space was set up in support of two types of displays; along the perimeter walls were hung prints of posters and large format reproductions of the newspaper cover illustrations.  The interior of the exhibit consisted of a half dozen large tables each holding several original copies of the Black Panther Party newspaper either displaying the cover illustrations or opened to reveal the editorial cartoons that accompanied many articles.

Mr. Douglas’ art did not develop its radical outlook over time; he burst on the scene with a clear message - “by whatever means necessary”.  (The Party’s Ten Point Platform provided plenty of material for him to work with.)  While the BPP newspaper was not widely read outside of the black community, his more provocative works did not go unnoticed.  Much to their dismay, artists of all types tend to get forever tied to their single most famous or infamous work, and Mr. Douglas is no exception.  No matter how celebrated his overall body of work, detractors will always point to the series of images of an ugly pink pig wearing a police uniform (typically the Oakland Police Department).  The depiction of a law enforcement officer as a pig was bad enough, but declaring “Off the Pig” (and several variations) was enough to draw the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

The illustrations from 1968 through 1971 are especially controversial for the ubiquitous presence of firearms; almost always aimed at police represented by the ugly pink pig.  Mr. Douglas was not just representing the frequent battles between BPP armed security cadres and local cops; his images included men, women, children, even toddlers and old women, all armed and ready to get down against the racist pigs.  The illustrations stressed the involvement of the entire black community in the struggle against police brutality.  These images of mothers with children, fat old grandmas and sweet little girls, all armed and ready to repel the pigs from their community are probably the most surprising and misunderstood by new generations unfamiliar with the divide running through urban America at that time.

Comparing the different reactions to Mr. Douglas’ strongest statements would make an interesting research topic. Lefties of a certain age remember such statements from one perspective while aging law and order conservatives remember them quite differently.  But most interesting is how people who were not yet alive during that time view these works.  Disbelief is often their strongest reaction; no one whose world view was formed in the post- 911 world can imagine that freedom of speech ever included calls to fight back against police abuse, up to and including “Off the Pigs!”

As many of the messages Mr. Douglas offers up are beyond confrontational, it would be easy to demand that the messages be viewed only in the context of that specific, difficult period in our history.   But for any of us old enough to have experienced that time, there is a more pressing issue that requires that we view his art in today’s setting of a uniquely divided nation.  Where one can easily ‘dismiss’  “Off the Pigs” as a curio of a nation in turmoil, the ultimately important question concerns whether the situations that motivated Douglas’ work have truly been resolved?   And if not, why aren’t today’s youth taking similarly radical stands?  Are black men no longer subject to abuse at the hands of racial, militaristic hoodlums wearing police uniforms?  If this type of abuse is no longer occurring, great!  But if it is, where is the level of outrage so readily apparent in the artwork of Mr. Douglas?  Where is an organization willing to stand up to the police, the FBI and the rest of government and shout out “No More”  (while holding rifles in case anyone wasn’t sure of their resolve)?