Curated by Sam Durant

Emory Douglas, former minister of culture for the Black Panthers, made illustrations for the party’s posters and insurgent newsletter covers from the mid- 1960s through the ’70s. While invoking Daumier, Heartfield, and Cuban poster art, the militant imagery commingles Kalashnikov rifles and African assegai with depictions of party members distributing free breakfasts to children and escorting the elderly through crime-ridden streets. This exhibition includes some 150 works, reconceptualizing a show from 2007 that Sam Durant curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Whether the presentations herald a new wave of radical chic or a recognition that some larger cultural crisis is dawning, what could be more timely than an exhibition about a self-proclaimed revolutionary who once called on artists to “take up their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other”?

— Gregory Sholette