The 60s and 70s Redux: All Power to the People
I could not have imagined when I was sixteen and seventeen years old selling The Black Panther newspaper on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, NY that forty years later I would finally meet the man who not only visually shaped the paper but also created the iconic images that were the visualization of the Black Panther Party's ideology and aspirations. And never in a million years would I have expected to meet him at a point when those same provocative and revolutionary images had been published in a coffee table style tome, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, straight from the presses of the venerated Rizzoli publishing house and were being exhibited in white box museums, both in the United State and abroad. Given how vociferously these images--of policemen and politicians depicted as slovenly pigs and gun toting black citizens threatening to level the uneven social playing field through martial force--had been vilified by mainstream political culture during the times in which they were made, it would have seemed positively surreal had anyone proposed the scenario as it now exists some forty years later.
















My own interest in photography had been sparked in 1968 when I inherited a camera from my godfather who had recently passed away. The Harlem On My Mind exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum the following year to picket lines, demonstrations and much controversy. The war in Vietnam was escalating, the first wave of the women's movement was taking shape and the civil rights movement had morphed into a movement of a more revolutionary and less conciliatory kind. Indeed, it was a moment when, "You were either part of the solution or you were part of the problem," as the popular saying of that time went. And so at the age of fifteen I found my way to the Black Panther Party's local office, located on New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard in my Queens, NY neighborhood. A high school classmate and fellow drummer Frank X Morris was already in the Party, and his political rhetoric and analysis seemed impressive enough to lead me to feel that I too needed to belong to an organization that was clearly not advocating a turn the other cheek strategy in the face of the increasingly repressive force that the political right was unleashing against those who did not support its policies, whether in Vietnam or in the larger social arena, and dared to protest. There was a popular saying within the Party that "Youth makes the revolution," and we were trying to live that out viscerally in our own young lives.


After signing in that first day and later attending my first political education class (after securing a copy of the then ubiquitous little Red Book by Chairman Mao Tse Tung) I was soon given a stack of newspapers to sell. Apparently one chose their own sales strategy and I quickly chose to park myself on the busy corner of Jamaica Avenue and 165th Street, in the heart of the main commercial section of Jamaica, Queens. Selling papers on weekends, my quiet earnestness must have been persuasive as I had no problem quickly selling out of each stack of papers I received. I was drawn to the Black Panther Party because of its desire to find concrete solutions to the needs of the poor and most oppressed segment of the black community: their establishing of a free breakfast program for children before the age of free school public school breakfasts was one of many ways that they attached concrete programs to very real needs. Before it was governmental policy the Party had realized that kids couldn't learn on empty stomachs and so set up these programs in each of the cities in which it was located in order to feed those kids whose families couldn't always afford to feed them.



While I must admit that the Party's emphasis on armed urban warfare (or self defense) never quite seemed like a plausible strategic program for anything other than a hugely lopsided bloodletting, I was drawn to its activist principals. A number of us were already applying these activist tactics at the high school level. Several of us black students were by then members of the Black Panther Party and, along with some white student activists who were members of Students for a Democratic Society, we decided to take inequitable matters into our own hands and request a meeting with Ben Michaelson, principal of our school, Benjamin N. Cardozo High School located in the then almost exclusively white neighborhood of Bayside, Queens. The upstart of this "meeting"--which almost immediately escalated into a confrontation--was that we barricaded the principal in the office with us, insisting that he concede to our demands for black teachers, African American history classes, and greater student participation in the school's administration among other things. The school's response, predictably, was to call the police, who quickly showed up in wave after wave of squad cars and police wagons. After smashing down the barricaded principal's office door when we refused to open it the police hoarded us all into their wagons for the brief ride to Queens County jail to await release to our variously disgruntled parents after which we waited for our collective day in Criminal Court in nearby Kew Gardens.

Now known as the Cardozo 41 we each ultimately received our own individual forms of justice. At least one of the teachers who was in the office with us that day who supported our stance and refused to testify in court was summarily fired or transferred and the school soon hired what we called its own "Mod Squad," a trio of black and white hip looking, attractive and young plain clothes police officers (two men and a women, just like the characters Pete, Julie and Linc of TV's "Mod Squad") whose job it was to stay close to us resident political "trouble makers" and be a visible but inconspicuous law enforcement presence as political unrest continued with classroom takeovers and moratoriums against the war in Vietnam. [Readers will no doubt be amused to know that Reginald velJohnson of "Die Hard" and later "Family Matters" fame was among those friends and classmates involved in the classroom takeovers and teach-ins as was Danny Simmons, one of New York's cultural stalwarts.]

All of this only fortified my resolve to continue the agitational and organizational work of the Party, which sadly began to implode as a consequence of various government instigated killings, disruptive agent infiltrations and other tactics directly related to the Conintelpro program that was established by the FBI to neutralize political dissidents.















The images created by Emory Douglas were, of course, central to the Party's identity. In addition to giving visual form to it programs and beliefs, this work clearly established a function for art. In addition to those pervasive images of policemen and politicians as ubiquitous pigs, Douglas also created works that celebrated the lives of the individuals in black communities struggling against great odds to maintain their dignity and humanity. I had only recently gotten my first camera around the time I joined the Black Panther Party and some years later began photographing people in Harlem, NY. This first project, "Harlem, USA," celebrated the lives of everyday people in this black urban community and was very much in the spirit of that work by Emory Douglas that lifted up these same largely uncelebrated lives. I would like to think that Douglas' images constitutes part of the foundation on which rests my own work. Much like other artists I was drawn to early on--Romare Bearden, Charles White and Jacob Lawrence--Douglas' work affirmed that the lives of ordinary everyday people do matter and that their experiences and representations can be the foundation for a meaningful and sustained art practice.

R.I.P Larry Sultan (1946 - 2009)

Larry Sultan sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago after a battle with cancer that began this past summer. A big hearted and intelligent guy, Larry certainly made his mark during his 63 years. I was fortunate to meet Larry through Jim Goldberg, another friend in San Francisco, and I quickly took a liking to him. I'd look him up whenever I visited San Francisco and always enjoyed seeing and talking with him. Larry seemed to have struck a happy balance between being a husband, father to two boys, teaching and mentoring at California College of Arts, making his own work and doing the periodic commercial assignments that came his way. Everyone who knew him always remarked on what a significant and sustaining presence he was in the lives of so many students who came out of CCA. He continually broke ground with his own work, moving from his earlier conceptual practice to his rigorous examination of his parents lives and the larger social world he inhabited and was curious about.

I had returned to San Francisco to be with friends there, all whom were heartbroken as the end neared for Larry, who passed on late in the day after I arrived. I was happy to get Larry out to Chicago a couple of years ago to share him with our students at Columbia College, each of whom he impressed with his generous feedback and response to their work. I will miss him and miss tooling around SF in his little Volkswagen Beetle. The lights of the SF Bay area and the Greenbrae Boardwalk community where he lived with his family will shine a little less brightly in his absence.

[Note: Photographer Alec Soth posted a thoughtful reflection about Larry and his work here:

Join the Larry Sultan FaceBook group here:

Photographs (from top): Art work © by Emory Douglas; Installation view "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas" at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; "The Black Panther" Newspaper; BPP Co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton at Oakland Party Headquarters; Emory Douglas photographed by Jed Brandt; Larry Sultan photographed by Kelly Sultan

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Labels: Art Benjamin N. Cardozo High School Black Panther Party Emory Douglas Larry Clark
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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