 | |  | | | CAUGHT IN TIME:
Photographer Pirkle
Jones captured this
image of a 1968
Black Panther
demonstration at
the Alameda
County Courthouse. | | |
'BLACK Panther Rank and File" now at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts celebrates the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later shortened to the Black Panther Party).
The exhibit offers an ambitious if romantic display of photographs, posters, party press newspapers and original artwork to construct what could be considered curatorial installation art. According to co-curator Rene de Guzman, the aim is to bring "political matters into a fine arts setting to posit a role for the arts that includes, among other things, its engagement with political activism and social change."
"Black Panther Rank and File" functions as a collaborative intervention, in which the exhibition coordinators and artists address political and social issues connected to the Panthers through a variety of modes of museum display. The individual pieces never function on their own but are usurped by the exhibition montage.
The exhibition presents the Panthers not as militant black nationalists, but as militant symbols of community self-defense, self-determination, and supporters of a united front politics.
Political artwork is most often viewed as having an accessible political message, often aimed at demystifing ideologies, raising issues to incite political action, transforming consciousness as a vehicle for social change or even the creation of a feeling of solidarity around political issues.
Here, the work documents and functions to recognize acts of resistance and artistic creation as a form of affirming the "human" in an otherwise alienating world where people are separated from nature, from each other, and from themselves in processes of economic exploitation.
However problematic or suspect one may view the exhibition's political analysis, the significance of "Black Panther Rank and File" reveals itself — whether consciously or unconsciously — in how it illustrates the politically charged, and shape-shifting nature, of images, meanings, and multiple viewer interpretations. Meanings change as objects are placed in new contexts and juxtaposed with one another: The Black Panther, the party's official newspaper that used to be sold on the street (like the homeless newspaper Street Sheet is today) becomes an artifact or historical document in the exhibit.
It is equally interesting that the subject of the exhibition — the Black Panthers — may be considered as initiating the exhibition's self-conscious presentation. The credibility and crises of multi-cultural relevance that museums and galleries have faced resulted from ideological challenges to the economic and cultural status quo faced by various dominate cultural institutions in the 1960s and 1970s.
These issues, which re-surface in the images and objects presented, reflect the effects of widespread counter-cultural struggles that impacted various social spheres and academia: cultural studies, women's studies, Chicano studies, African American studies and gender studies — all of which demanded greater social and structural transformation.
In the arts, this was manifested in processes of contesting euro-americentric ideals and definitions of "quality" and "beauty," feminist critiques of popular images, and in the development of culturally-specific exhibition spaces. All of this further contributed to the emergence of contestational ideological and formal artistic vocabularies.
These critical discourses were connected to anti-colonial struggles internationally, and protests from various marginalized groups domestically, that had historically been oppressed and persecuted — like the Panther membership.
In presenting the Panthers' historic participation in these struggles through a range of objects — photographs, | |  | | | OPEN TO INTERPRETATION: Jeff Sonhouse's untitled 2003 mixed media on paper is part of "Black
Panther Rank and File" on view through July 2 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
(JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY)
| | |
party newspapers, film and video and numerous art works — "Black Panther: Rank and File" forms a portrait of the Panthers as a young, defiant street-smart vanguard committed to community defense, food programs, educational programs, political provocation, and an eclectic brand of politics variously influenced by Malcolm X, Mao, Franz Fanon, and the New Left.
Furthermore, it also comments on how "image," style," fashion and visual culture are capable of forming contestational social statements. In this context, the exhibition comments not only on how images and literature on the Panthers constituted rhetorical devices that framed multiple public perceptions of the Panthers, but additionally, how ideas, images and objects from the past are transplanted, embody and in so doing create visual allusions to a range of historical encounters and conflicts through their continued use in the present.
"Black Panther Rank and File" shows how seemingly obvious pictures and objects are transformed into vehicles of diverse fantasy construction, interpretation and meaning through the viewer's personal identification with, or aversion to, the object. Or of greater importance, the exhibit allows for the visualization of alternative modes of being and, by extension, the creation of alternate economic, social and cultural realities.
Anthony Torres is a San Francisco-based art critic, curator and educator. | 
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