Emory Douglas

Emory Douglas worked as the resident Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1967 through the 1980s. In addition to creating iconic posters and postcards, a key part of Douglas’ responsibilities in this role included art direction, design, and illustration for the organization’s newspaper, The Black Panther. During his tenure, Douglas created powerful images to depict the reality of racial injustice in America and to promote the party’s ideologies. His distinctive style established the ​“militant-chic” style decades before the aesthetic became popularized and sought to flip the cultural paradigm from one of African American victimhood to one of powerful outrage.

Douglas’ work can be explored in full in the comprehensive monograph Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (Rizzoli, 2007). His work has also received retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York. In his retirement, Douglas continues to exhibit and make work on topics such as crime and the prison industrial complex. His work is included in the exhibition Have We Met? Dialogues on Memory and Desire, on view at Stamps Gallery (201 S. Division St.) through November 18. There will be a Q&A and post-talk reception at Stamps Gallery immediately following this event.

Presented in partnership with the Stamps Gallery, with support from Design Core Detroit.