8pm
Artist Talk by Emory Douglas
Emory Douglas, artist and Black Panthers’ Minister for Culture, discusses the graphic art he created for the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s through the early ‘80s as well as his contemporary work.
Throughout his career with the Black Panthers, Douglas created countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, as well as distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of these works utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.
with the support of Heinrich Böll Foundation
9.30pm
Agnes Varda
Black Panthers – Huey!
1968, 31 minutes, back and white, sound, English
The riveting documentary, "Black Panthers - Huey transports you to the pivotal Free Huey rally held on February 17th, 1968 (Newton's birthday), at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. Newton, the charismatic young college student who, along with Bobby Seale, created the Black Panther Party, had been jailed for allegedly killing a police officer. His arrest--widely believed at the time to be a setup--galvanized Party support throughout the nation and led to a boom in Party membership, bringing a new level of public attention to the Panthers' cause. Over 5,000 people attended the rally, which featured Party leaders and guest speakers including Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, James Forman, Bob Avakian, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and Ron Dellums. Through stark un-editorialized footage, this documentary chronicles the speakers outlining the Party's platform goals, their strategies for freeing Newton from jail and more.
Emory Douglas was born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been a resident of the Bay Area 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 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’s work at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas,” and in 2009 “Emory Douglas: Black Panther” at the New Museum, New York.
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.
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