Zapantera Negra by Afro~Ricanese

2/21/13

In this episode we feature former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party; Emory Douglas and artist Caleb Duarte as we discuss their "Zapantera Negra" Project; bridging the image and framework of both the Zapatistas and the Black Panthers.

Emory Douglas:

Emory Douglas was born May 24, 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has been a resident of the Bay Area since 1951.

As a teenager, Douglas was incarcerated at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California; during his time there he worked in the prison’s printing shop.

Douglas [later] attended City College of San Francisco where he majored in commercial art. He became the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, from February 1967 until its discontinuance in the early 1980s. His art was featured in The Black Panther newspaper with full-page illustrations that reflected the rhetoric and ideals of the Black Panther Party. The The Black Panther had a peak circulation of 139,000 per week in 1970 and has become an iconic representation of the struggles of the Party during the 1960s and 70s.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Douglas “branded the militant-chic Panther image decades before the concept became commonplace. He used the newspaper’s popularity to incite the disenfranchised to action, portraying the poor with genuine empathy, not as victims but as outraged, unapologetic and ready for a fight.”

Douglas’s art was also widely circulated and published around the world. His skills as a commercial artist were useful to the Black Panther Party’s development of its printed materials. Douglas’s poster art was pasted on the exterior of many buildings, walls, windows, and telephone polls across the United States. [and abroad]

Caleb Duarte:

Born in 1977, Caleb Duarte migrated from Mexico to the farm communities of the Central Valley of California when he was 4 years old. He began painting at a young age, and then went on to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a B.F.A. in 2003.

Caleb is noted for making temporary installations out of found materials such as drift wood, preferably using “something that has existed both in this world we’ve created and the nature where it came from” such as boats or bridges.

"I've always been interested in shelter. More than shelter, the spaces that we live in. What defines truth for us is what we've built[…]"
-Caleb Duarte

Themes:
Power to the People, Poder Para El Pueblo
Generational Gaps between 1970’s BPP use of image & Zapatistas
Use of art and public performance to create own ideas of a new world
Investigation of art—all its disciplines and contradictions
Affects of claiming autonomy & the value of impermanence