Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, will discuss his work in the context of the current exhibition “Emory Douglas: Black Panther.” Douglas created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for. The exhibition includes more than 150 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1966 to 1977. Artist and activist Rigo 23, a longtime friend and collaborator of Douglas’s, whose installation The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes is on view at the New Museum through October 11, will introduce the talk.

Emory Douglas was born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been a resident of the Bay Area since 1951. He was trained as a commercial artist at City College of San Francisco and has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. Douglas’s 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 2008-09. 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,” which is the inspiration for the presentation at the New Museum. The same year, Rizzoli published a book with the same title that included essays and interviews about Douglas’s work and his relationship to the Black Panther Party. 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, VA; and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston.

Rigo 23 was born in 1966 on Madeira Island, Portugal; he has lived and worked in San Francisco since the mid-1980s. His work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Art Institute; San Francisco State University; de Young, San Francisco; Richmond Art Center, Richmond; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); IT-Park Gallery, Taipei; The Royal College of Art, London; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Brasil; and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago. He was the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and has been awarded public commissions including murals for the San Francisco International Airport, the Gerbode Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

All images © 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York