ALPER INITIATIVE FOR WASHINGTON ART IT TAKES A NATION IT TAKES A NATION: ART FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE WITH EMORY DOUGLAS AND THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, AFRICOBRA, AND CONTEMPORARY WASHINGTON ARTISTS September 6 – October 23, 2016 American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Washington, DC ALPER INITIATIVE FOR WASHINGTON ART FOREWORD This exhibition presents the American important work gave visual form to I am grateful to Sandy Bellamy for University Museum’s best efforts to the 10 points of the Black Panther undertaking the formidable and timely accomplish artistic objectives rarely ideology that, unfortunately, continue task of organizing this exhibition and found in the same space and time: to have relevance fifty years later: writing the catalog, and Asantewa the exhibition is a program of the freedom, employment, opposition Boakyewa for her curatorial assistance. Alper Initiative for Washington Art, so against economic exploitation and Most importantly, I am thankful for our charge is to offer the community marginalization, affordable housing, the artists in the exhibition who have a venue for the examination and quality education, free health care, raised their voices so powerfully and promotion of the accomplishments opposition to police brutality, eloquently: Akili Ron Anderson, Holly of artists in the greater Washington, opposition to wars of aggression, Bass, Graham Boyle, Wesley Clark, Jay DC region. And, as a grantee of the opposition to the prison industrial Coleman, Larry Cook, Tim Davis, Jeff CrossCurrents Foundation, we are also complex, and access to the necessities Donaldson, Emory Douglas, Shaunté committed to presenting an exhibition of life. Gates, Jennifer Gray, Jae Jarrell, with strong relevance to the issues Wadsworth Jarrell, Njena Surae Jarvis, facing voters in the 2016 national The exhibition title is taken from an Simmie Knox, James Phillips, Beverly elections. It Takes a Nation: Art for influential 1988 hip-hop album by Price, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Social Justice with Emory Douglas and Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Amber Robles-Gordon, Sheldon Scott, the Black Panther Party, AFRICOBRA, Millions to Hold Us Back. The record, Frank Smith, Stan Squirewell, and Hank and Contemporary Washington Artists like the art in this exhibition, is both an Willis Thomas. We hope the exhibition is the result. artistic success and a strong political is an opportunity to communicate, to statement critical of whites for their confront uncomfortable and intractable The exhibition presents the graphic art violent and discriminatory practices truths, and find a way forward together. of Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture and of blacks for putting up with them. for the Black Panther Party from 1967 Like the Black Panther Party itself Jack Rasmussen to 1980, and its cross-generational (called “Public Enemy Number One” Director and Curator influence on artists living and working by J. Edgar Hoover), it is a call to resist American University Museum in Baltimore and Washington, DC, and a call to serve your communities in at the Katzen Arts Center including AFRICOBRA, from the positive ways, as well. Washington, DC 1960s through the present. Douglas’s IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK: A CROSS-GENERATIONAL INTERSECTION OF ART AND JUSTICE WITH EMORY DOUGLAS BY SANDY BELLAMY From time to time, museum curators may ask: rural lands produced Emory Douglas. Like What or when was the spark that ignited the many artists before him, Douglas was intent on flame for freedom among African American portraying the reality of the people in hopes of activists? That question presumes that the quest creating a more just society. for freedom was an epiphany of enlightenment in a particular person at a particular time. The As a bi-racial love child growing up in the inquisitor inevitably presumes that freedom for 1970s, I was encouraged by my free-thinking themselves was bequeathed as a birth right, parents to embrace all people regardless of but for the oppressed, it became an idea whose their differences and to never capitulate to time had come at some point later in life and anyone because of race. However, even in the was most likely in contrast to the lives of others. liberal 1970s, my childhood was framed by inci- As a curator, that question has been posed to dents of walking hand-in-hand with my father me regarding the lives of black leaders and art- down a city street where people called him ists from Frederick Douglass to Emory Douglas “nigger.” When I was with my parents together, and numerous other oppressed personages I felt the hot glares of people on my back, and throughout history. My answer regarding my face flushed red hot as the catcalls and Frederick Douglass was the same answer I hushed jokes were passed gratuitously. give now about Emory Douglas: the desire to be free is ubiquitous across race. Personal My formative years were spent in Washington, freedom to express oneself as an individual DC where an “Oreo” was not just a cookie; it being, to live one’s life as one chooses, and to was a nickname given to me in order to deni- embrace one’s own journey is an innate human grate my ethnicity. Despite the racial slurs and desire that begins at birth. The more oppres- jokes, my parents promised that the world was sive the means and measures taken to deny more tolerant than the segregated world of Jim personal freedom, the stronger the freedom Crow. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson, Prince, fighter becomes and the more passionate a Madonna, and Boy George became univer- person’s life work becomes. While the isolated sal icons of a new popular culture era where flat lands and bigotry of Maryland’s Eastern individuality and creativity were celebrated over Shore produced Frederick Douglass, the dense old guard stereotypes. Indeed, it was professed cities in the United States that are populated by that thirty years after the signing of the Civil African Americans who migrated from similarly Rights Act and more than a century after the 4 | IT TAKES A NATION Emancipation Proclamation, a more enlight- the illusion of racial harmony was initially most ened America now existed. But it did not. visceral by the O.J. Simpson case. For weeks, the nation watched as O.J. Simpson, an iconic In the 1990s, the foot-dragging resistance of African American sports star, defended himself racial intolerance exposed the assiduous acri- against charges that he murdered his white mony of a deep festering wound left unhealed. wife. The presumption of innocence or guilt was Four white Los Angeles police officers engaged divided neatly along the racial fault line, and the in a violent and brutal beating of a black man rancor was visceral. However, as of the writing named Rodney King. Fast forward to the new of this, we’ve experienced certainly the most millennium; Trayvon Martin was executed bloody and unnerving time in generations. In and George Zimmerman was exonerated. In just one week, two police killed Alton Sterling Baltimore, a young black man named Freddie in Baton Rouge, LA, for selling CDs and then Gray got a “rough” ride in a police van and died on the very next day, in Falcon Heights, MN, as a result. Eric Garner: death by police choke- Philando Castille was shot to death for reaching hold in New York City. A black 12 year-old on for his credentials during a traffic stop. Two days a swing in a local park was executed by white later, it was reported that five police officers policemen. In Ferguson, MO, Michael Brown, a were killed in Dallas, TX, in retaliation for police black man, shoplifted some cigarettes from a brutality. For too many of us who came of convenience store and was gunned down by age in the 1970s and 1980s, proclamations of a white officer. In Fairfax County, VA as recently “world peace” rang hollow. In fact, society is as as 2015, a 32 year-old mentally ill black mother divisive as ever. was hog tied naked and Tasered four times at 50,000 volts each by six white jail deputies It Takes a Nation: Art for Social Justice with until she expired. All deputies were acquitted Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party, of any wrongdoing despite the fact that Tasers AFRICOBRA, and Contemporary Washington are only supposed to be used as a restraint Artists is a massive intersection of political and device, and the woman was already completely visual content providing a cross-generational restrained. This incident resulted in weeks of conversation of social justice by legendary artist protests outside the jail and Fairfax County Emory Douglas and other artists in Washington, was labeled in the press as a “sanctuary county DC, including AFRICOBRA (African Com- for killer cops.” Perhaps the racial divide and mune Of Bad Relevant Artists), from the 1960s IT TAKES A NATION | 5 through the present. The Black Panther 10-Point HISTORY Platform is the focus of the exhibit, and the art- Emory Douglas’s art of protest is inspired by ists involved have created works that facilitate both the Realism and Social Realism schools of a dialogue about our salient past and contem- art and elucidate the plight and conditions of porary circumstances. Each artist chosen for the working class and the poor. The late 19th the exhibit has taken a leading role in merging century and the economic strife it brought exemplary aesthetics with sociopolitical aware- inspired artists of the time to create work that ness, reflection, and advocacy. Works include championed labor workers and depicted portraiture, abstract, conceptualism, multi-me- the harsh realities of the working class as dia, as well as two and three-dimensional opposed to the excess and leisurely lifestyles installation.