Black Panther
Rank + File

Huey P. Newton

Black Panther Rank + File illustrates the rise and fall of the radical African American political party by using stark black-and-white photos of Panthers with clenched fists “fighting the power,” Most important, it offers a peek into the minds behind the movement. How many times have we seen the iconic shot of Huey P. Newton in the bamboo chair or a brigade of Afro coiffed Black Panthers marching in black leather trench coats carrying rifles? The exhibition, originally organized by San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, highlights the genesis of the mantra-spewing revolutionaries beyond the well-known imagery by combining present day relevant art with a trek through a detailed history of the times.

Kathleen Neal Cleaver

Contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall’s eerie Souvenir: Composition in Three Parts, 1998-2000) features a funeral bouquet from Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 shown through the haziness of a television screen, illuminating how the powerful medium of television can make historical monuments seem like classic sporting events. But the best thing about Rank + File is that it does not abandon the viewer in the idealistic 1970s. Carrie Mae Weems’s 4 Women and John Bankston’s The Sermon shows the contemporary viewer that the Panthers were far from infallible by speaking to the Panthers alliances with the then burgeoning Women’s and Gay Rights movement— the partnerships were very silent, suggesting that within the party there was an unspoken hierarchy. But Slave 4 U, a spellbinding video by Michael Britto showing a group of men and women, dressed as slaves, performing choreographed minstrel show-like dances to the famous Britney Spears song juxtaposes today’s liberal attitudes towards sex and violence with a time when African-Americans had absolutely no say in how they were portrayed.

Slave 4 U                                                                                 Michael Britto

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