all image credits: Emory Douglas
With the current resurgent interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s been a lot of coverage of Black history and arts across the media. We caught a really interesting television documentary programme about the Black Panthers and it featured the poster art of Emory Douglas.
Douglas (b. 1943) was tasked with being ‘Revolutionary Artist’ and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its dissolution in the 1980s. He created the artworks in the party’s Black Panther which, at one point, was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, boasting a weekly circulation of more than 300,000.
In addition to the newspaper, he created posters, postcards and flyers using his signature style – bold, black graphics, limited colour palette, moving slogans and often collage.
He’s the person that’s often credited with popularising the moniker ‘pigs’ for corrupt police officers:
In American culture, pigs are animals wallowing in filth and dirty. So I took that thought and applied it to the pig drawing itself. Then once I put the pig on two legs, gave it a badge and had the flies flying around, it transcended the boundaries of the African-American community and became an international icon that everybody identified with as a symbol of oppression by government and the police. NY Times
He has exhibited his work internationally, in museums & galleries such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007), Urbis, Manchester (2008) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009).
Douglas received the 2015 medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) – in recognition of “his fearless and powerful use of graphic design in the Black Panther party’s struggle for civil rights and against racism, oppression, and social injustice.”
There’s a book about the art of Emory Douglas that’s sometimes available on Amazon and Abe Books.
Check out the interview with Douglas at the bottom of this post which puts his work into historical and social context.
