Artist’s talks in Auckland rarely pack out a venue. But it was standing room only for the crowds that filed into lecture theatres in August to hear Black Panther artist Emory Douglas talk about his work. A diverse mixture of politically motivated groups made up the audience. Grey Lynn’s Polynesian Panthers, young Anarchist-leaning hippies and others of a Green persuasion sat with students, academics, artists and graphic designers. With no empty seats available, people squatted in the isles. It felt like another time.
Douglas was Black Panther Minister of Culture during the1960s and ’70s when the revolutionary group struggled with authorities to raise both political consciousness and basic living standards in America’s poor black urban communities. Trained as a commercial artist, he designed the party’s Black Panther newspaper as well as posters, illustrations, cards and other ephemeral material that offered information and supported the cause. A collection of these original materials was exhibited at Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery along with large reproductions of posters plastered on the gallery’s pristine walls.
Douglas’s posters and designs have the persuasive visual simplicity of advertising. Images of black people stuck in unrelenting poverty, claiming civil rights or boldly defying the ‘Pigs’ (fat, fly-infested portraits of corrupt police) are rendered in a clear-cut graphic style. Douglas’s starkly defined figures drawn against flat blocks of colour offer an immediate visual punch. It is not hard to imagine the impact they must have had on both street corners and in American university campuses. A call to action is explicit—if not an incitement to militant action (as the prevalence of guns in Douglas’s imagery suggests), then a demand to develop a sense of political agency amongst poor black