How the art of black power shook off the white gaze

Long before the rise of tech corporations, high rents and Lime scooters, the Bay Area was a breeding ground for for black artists and activists. Artists such as Emory Douglas created Soviet-influenced protest art for the Black Panther newspaper; Raymond Saunders strived to highlight the beauty of blackness with his coal-dark backdrops and figures; Cleveland Bellow brought art into the streets with his public murals and billboards.

During this period, black art became louder, prouder, and unconcerned with the white gaze.

• Emory Douglas’s posters.

This shift is celebrated in the De Young museum’s latest exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983, which arrives in San Francisco after debuting in London in 2017 and stopping off in Brooklyn, Bentonville, Arkansas, and Los Angeles.

Set against the backdrop of black displacement in the Bay Area – San Francisco’s black population has dwindled from 13% in 1970 to 5% today – this iteration includes additional works by local artists and celebrates the Bay Area’s role in the black power movement.

The reception area of the De Young revives an exhibition that the museum first staged in 1968 – black-and-white photos of the Black Panthers, captured by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch. These photos include a classroom of young black students eagerly learning, two men resting after a protest, children laughing. The images are moving but also crushing because 50 years later, portraits of black children smiling still feel under-seen.

• #62 from A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers. The De Young has revived an exhibition it originally hosted in 1968.

The exhibition’s Black Power and Art in the Streets section features Cleveland Bellow’s untitled 1968 sketch of a black boy with his arms raised. Bellow later turned the sketch into an Oakland billboard, part of the wave of black murals and public art that flooded large cities. This week, the museum will re-create the billboard.

Throughout the show’s run, the De Young is committed to increasing the diversity of visitors by hosting free days and community programming, including a block party and screening of the recent film The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

Much of the art created in the Bay Area during the black power movement can be traced back to the Black Panther party. Through its free breakfast programs, cultural centers, and community newspapers, the party provided invaluable resources and support to black artists. Artists were often deeply connected to the party: Emory Douglas served as the minister of culture, mentoring young artists and leading the artistic direction of the Black Panther newspaper.

• Betye Saar, Rainbow Mojo, 1972.

The black power movement is frequently historicized as being rife with militant anger and radicalism. But the artworks here reveal thoughtful, considered wrestlings with the question of how black pain and liberation are represented.

There are experiments with abstractionism, in-your-face nude portraits that confront racist stereotypes about the black body, and mixed-media art created with soiled paper bags, type 4C hair, and objects purchased at the Bay Area’s celebrated Alameda Flea Market.

Related: Black Panthers in the 1960s: a rare intimate look – in pictures

Many of the Bay Area artists featured originally created their work for group shows at the Rainbow Sign, a black cultural center that operated in Berkeley from 1971 to 1977. Rainbow Sign was a little bit of everything to the black community, and even the presidential candidate Kamala Harris attended when she was “that little girl”. The space provided discounted meals to children, staged concerts for Nina Simone and held book signings for Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In 1973, the Rainbow Sign held a group exhibition centered around reimagining the racist caricature Aunt Jemima. A piece from that show, by Betye Saar, is included at the De Young. In Saar’s colorful, slightly irreverent work, an Aunt Jemima figurine holds a broom and a shotgun, existing between forced domesticity and violent revolution.

• Top: Barkley L Hendricks, What’s Going On, 1974. Bottom left: A view of the gallery. Bottom right: Jae Jarrell with her Revolutionary Suit, remade 2010, in London.

Inevitably, Soul of a Nation mirrors the black power movement and features a disproportionate number of male artists and subjects.

“When I think about my work, and I look at what I see here at the exhibition, I wish I made more work with women in it,” the Bay Area artist Mike Henderson admitted. During the early years of his career, he focused on figurative drawings of black men, which were heavily inspired by the Chicago Black Renaissance artist Charles White. “I don’t want to criticize, but when I think of the ‘soul of a nation’, I think of a woman. Black women are the matriarchs of our culture.”

The imbalance in representation highlights the complicated role gender played in the Black Power movement. Yes, women were commonly given leadership roles and included in the action, but they still faced misogyny and erasure.

• Barbara Jones-Hogu, Unite, 1971.

Jae Jarrell, who created Afro-centric textile and fashion work during her time in Chicago’s AfriCobra collective, touched on the increased pressure women faced. She had to fight to convince the other members her work was worthwhile. At a preview of the exhibition, she pointed at a skirt and jacket she had made, existing somewhere between fashion and sculpture as they hung on a mannequin, and exclaimed: “The subject of this was ‘I’m better than these motherfuckers and they know it!’”

Soul of Nation captures a shift in how black people used art in the fight for liberation. Artists were no longer satisfied with pain being seen; they wanted it to be felt.

“Picasso said that paintings should have razor blades on them,” Henderson said, summing up the movement’s driving ethos. “Grab their attention and wake them up. That’s what I tried to do.”

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 will run at the De Young Museum from 9 November 2019 – 15 March 1 2020

Images courtesy Gary Sexton; De Young Museum/the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz; estate of Barkley L Hendricks/Jack Shainman Gallery; Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock; Estate of Barbara Jones-Hogu; Lusenhop Fine Art