Home > Exhibition > Essays > Power to the People Faith Ringgold’s Black Panther Posters

Power to the People Faith Ringgold’s Black Panther Posters

MAURA CALLAHAN

In 1970, the artist Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem, New York) created two posters nearly lost to history. Such is often the fate of posters and other works on paper, especially those which are reproduced in very limited quantities. Created to stir up public support of the Black Panther Party, Ringgold’s two collaged posters were never reproduced as originally intended—until 2022, when they received a second life as editioned serigraphs commissioned by ACA Galleries. Expertly printed by David C. Driskell Center (DCDC) director Curlee Raven Holton, the new prints appear alongside other works from Ringgold’s print oeuvre as well as those of her contemporary, Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles, California), in the landmark exhibition Ringgold | Saar: Meeting on the Matrix at the DCDC. The revival of Ringgold’s Committee to Defend the Panthers [Fig. 1] and All Power to the People [Fig. 2] warrants a critical return to their political origins and significance in the context of the Black Power movement.(1) The posters’ complicated history and nuanced yet resonant expressions of Black liberation speak to Ringgold’s ambivalent relationship to Black Power during its heyday in the late sixties and early seventies, as well as her challenged (and challenging) position within the art world throughout her career.

   

Founded in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense organized and empowered Black men and women to resist systemic racism and police brutality by confronting law enforcement, advocating for policy change, providing essential services to Black communities, and (where possible) embracing the right to publicly bear arms. The Party soon became a popular organization with chapters in several major American cities. At its peak, membership approached 2,000 by the late 1960s, prompting fear-mongering coverage from the white mainstream media and outright attacks by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. By 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had identified the Panthers as the greatest internal threat to the country.(2) The same year, twenty-one members of the Panthers’ New York chapter, one of the country’s largest and most active, were arrested and indicted for conspiring to bomb the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, police stations, and department stores—a charge based on the claims of three paid informants.(3) The Committee to Defend the Panthers was formed predominantly by white activists to fundraise for the accused members’ legal expenses, including a $100,000 bail set for each prisoner. However, most of the accused remained in jail until the group was finally acquitted in 1971.(4) 

In 1970 Ringgold created a poster she hoped the Committee would sell as part of their fundraising campaign. Collaged from cut-and-pasted colored paper, the poster was the first of several Ringgold would go on to produce in the early seventies. From the beginning of this series, Ringgold exhibited her prowess as both graphic designer and artist, deploying text and figuration as equally powerful expressions of her call to action. In the first poster, the shape of a Black, disembodied head seems to leap from the surface of the red ground. Animating this movement, the words “defend the panthers” form concentric arches around the face. The head reappears in profile as silhouettes to its left and right. Most dizzying are the eyes, asymmetrically colored in red, green, gray, and black. The entire design—as well as subsequent posters—are limited to this selective palette, drawing from the Pan-African flag associated with Black liberation. Below the head and its framing text is the dual slogan “free all political prisoners/ all power to the people.” 

Despite the poster’s visual power, it was rejected by the Committee. According to Ringgold, members objected to the display of their headquarters address and phone number out of fear of exposure to potential threats. The artist went back to the drawing board. Although she could have easily cropped out or pasted over the offending text at the bottom of the poster, she instead returned with an entirely new design. In this second iteration, she removed not only the address information, but also the name of the Committee, keeping only the color scheme and the two-part slogan which appeared in the first poster. Whereas in the previous version figure and text had both acted as equally dynamic forms, Ringgold’s redesign focused on the commanding presence of three figures. Both armed with gray rifles, an Afro’d woman appears with a man in a black beret and an ammunition belt slung across his chest. Between them stands a small child holding a blunt weapon. The figures’ green-accented clothing radiates against the solid red background. Like the three heads in the first poster, the figures’ mouths appear open as if silently voicing the rallying cry at the bottom and top of the frame. This design, too, proved unsatisfactory to the Committee, which turned down the poster again for reasons which remain unclear. Although Ringgold recalled the Committee’s desire for a design which would incorporate the slogan “Kill Whitey” (an idea Ringgold rejected), it has been suggested that her posters might have been viewed as too confrontational to yield support for the controversial cause from ambivalent white audiences.(5) In any case, “I was never able to please [the Committee],” Ringgold reflected years later. “...I think they did not understand that political art is art.”(6)

Unfortunately, the same was true of the art world. In the years leading up to Ringgold’s posters, the art market had been ruled by the detached gloss of Pop art and the rationality of the burgeoning conceptual and minimalist art movements. “Issue-oriented art was dismissed as being naive, if not downright vulgar,” Ringgold recalled. “Art was a conceptual or material process, a commodity and not a political platform… To be emotionally involved in art was considered primitive.”(7) This institutional aversion to political art was not unrelated to the racist curatorial practices which denied Black artists—especially Black women—equal opportunity to have their works exhibited or sold at mainstream institutions alongside their white and male contemporaries. This was an injustice Ringgold refused to accept. During these years and into the early seventies, she devoted much of her time to organizing and participating in protests against anti-Black exclusion at major museums in New York, namely the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. But racism was not Ringgold’s sole obstacle as an artist. Avenues open to Black male artists such as Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis were closed to Ringgold, who was rejected by both the Studio Museum in Harlem and the predominantly male Black artist collective Spiral.(8) The rising tide of second wave feminism, furthermore, did not serve Black women like Ringgold. The path that was cleared in the early seventies for feminist art was largely reserved for white women such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. While this double bind proved to be a significant constraint on Ringgold’s career, she nonetheless found opportunity in exclusion. “I’m not a member of those groups that would profit from being on the cutting edge,” she said. “I’m not a man and I’m not white. So I can do what I want to do and that has been my greatest gift.”(9)

It would be a mistake, however, to understand Ringgold as an “outsider” removed from the discourse of American modernism and the institutional art world. On the contrary, her work frequently drew from and subverted Euro-American art history. The Black Panther posters arrived shortly after Ringgold completed her Black Light series (1967–1969), a group of figurative and text-based paintings which played on the ostensibly disinterested formalism of the painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) to ironically political ends. During these years, Ringgold used black pigment, rather than white, to produce a nuanced spectrum of color which recalled Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, a series of stark, geometric abstractions of minimal tonal and color range rendering their forms barely perceptible. Ringgold used a similar color palette, not to make her paintings illegible but to demonstrate the vitality and range of color and form which exists in darkness. This was no mere formal experiment, but a deeply humanist expression rooted in Ringgold’s antiracist approach to figuration and abstraction. “Black art must use its own color black to create its light, since that color is the most immediate black truth,” Ringgold wrote in 1970. “Generally, black art must not depend on lights or light contrasts in order to express its blackness, either in principle or fact.”(10) Ringgold used dark colors to paint Black figures and text-based abstractions composed as African Bakuba-inspired geometric patterns, a format she would soon revisit in political posters produced in 1971 (and which were arguably in indirect conversation with the concurrent Op-art movement). [Fig. 3] According to Ringgold’s daughter Michele Wallace, this new palette produced “the aesthetic accompaniment to the Black Power movement.”(11)

Ringgold’s posters of the early seventies can be seen as a culmination of the innovations in her painting practice during the 1960s as well as her recent growth as an activist. The productive constraints she set for her color palette in the Black Light paintings prepared her to produce vivid designs from a narrow selection of colored paper: each poster was limited to only two to five colors. Although more dramatic color contrasts appear in the posters than in the more muted Black Light paintings, both bodies of work refuse whiteness. The dark browns, grays, blues, greens, and violets of the Black Light paintings became the deep black and bright red and green of Ringgold’s posters. Beyond signaling the flag of the Black Power movement, Ringgold’s use of these colors produces difference through the juxtaposition of complementary hues rather than tonal oppositions (i.e. the binary black-to-white spectrum). Her use of cut paper, which exhibits a flatness in color distinct from the subtle tonal variations produced by the viscosity of paint, augments this color-driven contrast. 

The experimental forms and, moreover, political nuance of the posters exemplify what literary scholar GerShun Avilez refers to as aesthetic radicalism, which “describes artistic inhabiting and reconfiguring of political radicalism.”(12) Although Ringgold’s posters appear at first to operate squarely within the visual language of Black Power, close study reveals that this language was more fragmented than coherent, and more productively tested than strictly observed. Artists—in particular Black feminists—like Ringgold pushed against Black nationalism’s limitations while also advancing its call for racial justice and the credo “Black is beautiful.” On a formal level, this constructive ambivalence is seen in the posters’ simultaneous engagement with Euro-American modernism and embrace of the Pan-African color palette—and more importantly, her subversion of the former to elaborate the visual power of the latter.

Ringgold’s politics were, after all, not entirely consistent with the ideology of the Black Power movement. As curator Mark Godfrey writes, Ringgold’s political and artistic aspirations were distinct from many figures of the Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of Black Power. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, leading advocates of the Black Arts Movement, supported a total repudiation of white aesthetics in favor of “the veritable quest for a Black Aesthetic.”(13) For these men, Black Power was not possible within the existing American political and cultural paradigm. Ringgold, in contrast, sought, in Godfrey’s words, to “recognize what was happening on the streets, give it representation, and reform American art and attitudes.”(14) Ringgold expressed her reformist position through her persistent demands for more inclusive curatorial practices at mainstream museums (as opposed to a total rejection of their validity) as well as her visual and conceptual engagement with the legacies of European and American modernists like Ad Reinhardt in addition to Picasso, Josef Albers, and Jasper Johns, whom she also admired.(15) She did not wish to denounce either America or the dominant art historical canon; she sought to claim her rightful place within both.

The gendered hierarchies built into the Black Power movement, furthermore, were a continuous point of critique for Ringgold. Although the Black Panther Party was only able to exist through the labor of female members, men held most leadership positions and, in some cases, were even known to use their power to demand sexual favors from female Party members.(16) Despite the significant contributions of artists such as Barbara Jones-Hogu and Jae Jarrell and poets like Nikki Giovanni, the public face of the Black Arts Movement was likewise predominantly male. Writing about the political and countercultural shifts of the late sixties, Ringgold expressed her ambivalence toward the Black Power movement: “In many ways, I had no idea what Black Power meant. My own need to feel a sense of personal as well as public power was in direct contrast to a world that ignored women of all races. For me the concept of Black Power carried with it a big question mark. Was it intended only for the black men or would black women have power too?”(17) The same year she produced the Black Panther posters, she also co-founded the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, which addressed the underrepresentation of women artists in the Whitney Annual; and the Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, which demanded inclusion of women and Black artists at the Venice Biennale. Ringgold even identified 1970 as the year she “became a feminist” despite persistent criticisms from her peers who maintained that “being black and a feminist was equivalent to being a traitor to the cause of black people.”(18)

Ringgold’s complex relationship to Black Power radicalism, as well as her unapologetically Black feminist position, is on full display in the second Black Panther Poster. On one hand, by literally weaponizing the family against the state, her depiction of an armed Black family subverts the state’s exploitation of the nuclear family as a contained hierarchical unit in the service of capitalism. The child’s presence in the poster also serves as a reminder of the Panthers’ support of Black families, which included free breakfast programs, after-school education, and health services—initiatives intentionally obscured by the white media, which focused almost entirely on the Party’s militancy. Ringgold does not downplay the important role of armed confrontation in the Panthers’ platform, but instead uses the image of a gun-carrying family to encapsulate both the Party’s controversial tactics and its undervalued community service. 

In other ways, Ringgold’s representation of the Panthers departs from the Party’s official branding. Women and children carrying guns frequently appeared in Black Panther propaganda created by the party’s Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas; however, in these images the mother is usually shown in an explicitly maternal position (i.e. holding or attending to the child), and without the presence of a father. [Fig. 4] The Black Panthers repudiated the nuclear family model, which Huey Newton condemned as “imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating.”(19) Ringgold’s revolutionary family is unusual in its inclusion of a man, woman, and child together and individually armed, appearing in opposition to the Panthers’ rejection of traditional family structures and paradoxical reinforcement of women’s subordination. As Avilez writes, artists working in the vein of aesthetic radicalism approached nationalism “as a contested terrain that at times aligns with normative values and at other times rejects such affiliations in the process of censuring oppressive state actions.”(20) Ringgold’s poster redresses the hierarchical and exclusionary tendencies of Black nationalism, visualizing Frances Beale’s call to action in her formative text “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” written in 1969:

Old people, young people, men and women must take part in the struggle. To relegate women to purely supportive roles or to simply cultural considerations is a dangerous doctrine to project. Unless black men who are preparing themselves for armed struggle understand that the society which we are trying to create is one in which the oppression of all members of that society is eliminated, then the revolution will have failed in its avowed purpose.(21)

By no means, however, should Ringgold’s divergence from her Black male revolutionary contemporaries undermine an understanding of her own radicalism and affinities with the Black Power movement. According to Wallace, Ringgold’s position within the struggle for racial justice aligned more closely with the contentious politics of Malcolm X than the resolutely nonviolent resistance movement of Martin Luther King, Jr.(22) Furthermore, although she set out to produce a body of work “that would take into account her extensive training in the canon of European art and American modernism,” as Wallace noted, her career would “nonetheless mark her contribution as singular and indelibly that of a person of African descent.”(23) While the hope Ringgold maintained for art institutions was partially at odds with the overarching values of the Black Arts Movement, she did not deny its meaningful aesthetic contributions. She admired the work of Baraka, and the feeling was mutual: The writer referred to Ringgold’s Black feminist posters (produced a year following the Black Panther posters in the same material and Black Power tricolor palette) as “modern classics,” and wrote that her political work illuminated “the insurgency to come.”(24) 

The influence of the Black Arts Movement is evident in Ringgold’s original poster design. Her manipulation of text recalls that of AfriCOBRA (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a Chicago-based Black artist collective which believed in fostering “specific visual qualities intrinsic to our ethnic group.”(25) A core principle in the art of AfriCOBRA was the practice of lettering, or the use of text as a graphic element: “The subject matter must be completely understood by the viewer; therefore lettering would be used to extend and clarify the visual statement,” wrote AfriCOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu. However, “the lettering was to be incorporated into the composition as a part of the visual statement and not as a headline.”(26) In her original Black Panther poster, the words “defend the Panthers” take on an active role as abstract forms which exceed their function as legible symbols. As Margo Natalie Crawford suggests, AfriCOBRA “often staged the tension between the abstract nature of color and the representational system that makes letters and words become signs that can no longer be viewed as random marks and brush strokes.”(27) As in Jones-Hogu’s untitled screenprint from 1969 [fig. 5], the concentric orientation of the text in Ringgold’s Committee to Defend the Panthers animates the image by introducing unexpected curves. At the same time, the words appear to lock the central head in place, evoking the confinement of the indicted Panthers. The silhouetted heads on either side, moreover, recalls the three heads in Jones-Hogu’s screenprint Rise and Take Control, created the same year. [Fig. 6] The three-headed figure has appeared in sculpture from Africa, whose visual cultures served as a source of inspiration for both AfriCOBRA and Ringgold. [Fig. 7]

       

Despite her own reservations about Black Power and her desire to engage with dominant art institutions and history, Ringgold’s work during this period—not the least her Black Panther posters—share aspects of Black Power’s politics and visual expression. In the posters’ translation from collage to print, her articulations of Black liberation are not merely repeated, but extended. The posters’ Black Light-influenced color contrasts, for example, are deepened by the posters’ reiterations in silkscreen ink, which preserves the collages’ flatness while amplifying saturation. According to Holton, Ringgold’s trusted master printer since 1993, the artist commands a great deal of authority in the editioning process, especially in decisions related to color, for which Ringgold seeks both visual nuance and intensity.(28) The transformation from collage to print also positions the posters within the history of printmaking as resistance, which extends back to the antiwar etchings of Francisco Goya (1746–1828), with whom Holton has compared Ringgold for their mutually “deep sense of public responsibility.”(29) This has been evident not only in Ringgold’s art, but in her direct action against racism and misogyny in the art world and beyond. Her insistence on recognizing both the promise and limitations of radical movements—artistic and otherwise—has solidified her unique, self-determined position within Black Power. In her posters, this vantage point materializes, and thanks to the reproductive power of print, can now be realized once again.

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(1) The commission includes the editioning of three other works from Ringgold’s Political Poster series: American Free Angela, Women Free Angela, and Woman Freedom Now (all 1971).

(2) J. Edgar Hoover quoted in “FBI Director Blacks Black Panthers,” Oakland Tribune, July 15, 1969, 17.

(3) Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 213.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold, and Kirsten Weiss, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power, first edition, ed. Elena Cheprakova and Darla Migan (Berlin, Germany: Weiss Publications, 2022), 40.

(6) Ibid., 42.

(7) Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 154.

(8) Lucy Lippard, “Hot from Her Soul: Faith Ringgold’s Art Activism,” in Faith Ringgold: American People, ed. Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari (London, England: Phaidon Press Limited, 2022), 10.

(9) Faith Ringgold, “Interviewing Faith Ringgold/A Contemporary Heroine,” in Eleanor Flomenhaft, Faith Ringgold: A 25 Year Survey (Hempstead, NY: Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, 1990), 15.

(10) Ringgold quoted in Carroll Greene, ed., “Black Art: What Is It?” (questionnaire), Art Gallery 13, no. 7 (April 1970), reprinted in The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings By and About Black American Artists, 1960-1980, ed. Mark Godfrey and Allie Biswas (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2021), 215.

(11) Michele Wallace, “America Black: Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 29 (2011): 52, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480696.

(12) GerShun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism, The New Black Studies Series  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 12.

(13) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxv.

(14)  Mark Godfrey, “Murals on 57th Street,” in Faith Ringgold: American People, 27.

(15) Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge, 157, 158, 162.

(16) Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 303.

(17) Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge, 158.

(18) Ibid., 175.

(19) Bloom and Martin, 195.

(20) Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism, 14.

(21) Frances M. Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” Meridians 8, no. 2 (2008): 166–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338758.

(22) Wallace, “America Black: Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series,” 52.

(23) Ibid., 51.

(24) Amiri Baraka, “Faith,” Black American Literature Forum 19, no. 1 (1985): 12, https://doi.org/10.2307/2904463.

(25) Barbara Jones-Hogu, “Inaugurating AfriCOBRA History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 30 (2012): 90, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480715.

(26) Ibid., 92.

(27) Margo Natalie Crawford, “When Black Experimentalism Became Black Power: The Black Arts Movement and Its Legacies,” The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 111.

(28) Curlee Raven Holton, conversation with author, November 8, 2022.

(29) Curlee Raven Holton, Faith Ringgold: A View from the Studio (Boston: Bunker Hill Pub in association with Allentown Art Museum, 2004), 38.