Black Panther Emory Douglas at SFAI Wed April 9

Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture: Emory Douglas with Sam Durant and Jennifer González

Wednesday, 9 April at 7:30pm
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

Emory Douglas worked as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 80s. Douglas’s graphic designs defined the trademark visual style of the group’s newspapers, posters, and pamphlets. Disseminating the party’s agenda in a visually powerful way, Douglas’s bold illustrations and striking images spoke forcefully to a community ravaged by poverty and police brutality. Douglas portrayed a populace emerging from segregation and beginning to assert their rights to equality. A retrospective exhibition Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (organized by Sam Durant) recently showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Sam Durant creates installations that explore the history of modernist art and design, American politics, and the search for social justice. Public collections of Durant’s work include the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, Tate Modern in London, Project Row Houses in Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He teaches at California Institute of the Arts.

Jennifer González is associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UC Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art, and activist art. González’s forthcoming book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, examines installation art as a form of critical assessment of race politics in the US.