Fashion show, 50 Years Later: The Art Show, October 7, 2016, SoleSpace, Oakland. Photo: Senay Alkebu-Lan

Over the previous five decades, institutional recognition of BPP accomplishments has proceeded, with slowly increasing attention to the iconic work of artist and former BPP Minister of Culture Emory Douglas in book and exhibition form. Rather than waiting for the Panthers to be celebrated in spaces where Whiteness and the benefactors of its privilege hold sway, Party members and allies have, for years, staged exhibitions and performances in both traditional and unconventional spaces. The Party’s fiftieth anniversary carries forward the legacy that protest, or celebration, can take place anywhere, while demonstrating art’s potential to galvanize and venerating those who have fallen.

One of the two largest exhibitions, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), comprehensively elucidates the Party’s origin, activities, accomplishments, and the direct influence they have in today’s fight against institutional racism and its agents. While the other regional exhibitions (The Point Is…2.0: Black Panther Party 50th Exhibit at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 50 Years Later: The Art Show at SoleSpace, and ICONIC: Black Panther at American Steel Studios) pay homage to the Party’s rich visual legacy through specific aspects of the Party’s history—including women’s participation and influence throughout the Party or the Ten-Point Plan—All Power to the People provides both a thorough historical overview and contemporary meditations by artists Carrie Mae Weems, David Huffman, Hank Willis Thomas, Sadie Barnette, Trevor Paglen, and William Cordova.

Anonymous. Untitled (Clenched Fist), circa 1965; wood; 3 x 5.5 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum Purchase.

Oakland-based archivist and activist Lisbet Tellefsen and curator Ashara Ekundayo drew Melorra and Melonie Green into their collaborative fold to organize the expansive installation Survival Pending Revolution: Black Panther 50. Archival and Contemporary Musings on Love and its conjunct Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar at Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland. Survival Pending Revolution occupies nearly every wall of the Hub with rare and never-before-exhibited photographs, posters, and newspaper articles from Tellefen’s collection. Emphasizing women’s significant and oft underrepresented participation in the Party, its social programs, and international reach, the installation is a powerful reminder that archival exhibitions need not be tedious. Posters are dynamically hung along the walls of the Hub’s internal staircases and evoke a feeling similar to looking at family photos in a friend’s house. The installation presents a visual narrative of Party members engaged in an urgent fight for survival that was waged on multiple fronts and across international boundaries, which starkly contrasts with the dominant and racist media portrayal of Party members as menacing Black men carrying guns. While the space isn’t ideal for viewing objects in aggregate, Survival Pending Revolution encourages one to think about the Party’s focus on work as a collective activity and mirrors the tenets that were and are central to the BPP ethos and the Hub’s business model: inclusivity, creativity, reciprocity, and effectiveness.

Tarika Lewis. What’s on Your Shelf; book collage; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Joyce Gordon Gallery. Photo: Eric Murphy

Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar, as Ekundayo describes, is a “living exhibition” comprising contemporary works and creative responses to Tellefsen’s archival material that grows as visitors add the names of Party members who have been forgotten. Oakland-based artist and educator Joan Tarika Lewis, who was the first woman to join the party and contributed her prodigious talents to the Party newspaper under the name Matilaba, contributed a mural in less than thirty minutes. Other artists, including Karen Seneferu, likewise responded to the archival material by producing pieces that praise women’s work and further define the lineage between social-justice efforts then and now. Co-curator Melorra Green explains, “For Comrade Sister, Melonie and I handpicked Black women artists who we knew could lift, elevate, and echo the women of the Movement. Their stand. Their voice. Their pain. Their courage. All in this one space as a womb.”

After Emory Douglas’s seminal work, photography was the dominant visual medium that captured the Black Panthers and the roiling sociopolitical milieu out of which it burst. At the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the African American Library and Museum at Oakland, two final exhibitions capture what was, and in bittersweet fashion, what could have been. The World of the Black Panthers at UC Berkeley is an installation of twenty-four black-and-white photographs by Stephen Shames that document BPP activity in the East Bay and beyond. Shames met Party co-founder Robert George “Bobby” Seale while photographing Vietnam War protests in Berkeley in 1967. The two formed a tight professional and personal relationship, which allowed Shames insider access to the Party and its members. While Shames turned his camera to a variety of Party activities—rallies and demonstrations most prominently—his unfettered access also enabled him to capture more intimate moments such as teachers and students in the classroom, and senior citizens receiving food or transportation assistance. Shames’ images visualize the Party’s core work, and the display of his photographs in a hallway that is transited by journalists and journalists-in-training reminds us that the media at large cannot, must not, surrender to creeping political or social influence on matters of race.

Suzun Lucia Lamaina. Emory Douglas; photograph; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of Suzun Lucia Lamaina.

Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panthers in Portraits and Stories, an installation of forty-five black-and-white portraits by Bay Area photographer Suzun Lucia Lamaina, greets visitors at the top of central staircase in Oakland’s stately African American Museum and Library. Her subjects—members and associates of the Party who now sport gray hair and laugh lines—were photographed over the course of her five-year journey around the United States. Through photographs and personal statements, Lamaina’s work documents what BPP members accomplished after they left the Party, and reveals both their extraordinary achievements and the mundane details of day-to-day life. What emerges from these heartfelt statements is that for so many individuals, Party membership solidified the meaning of community as African American culture was under attack. Those lived experiences continue to sustain them as the fight for social justice persists. The testimonials of these now-elder members are haunted by the memories of comrades who didn’t live long enough to see the Party’s profound impact, and of the African American men, women, and children whose lives were cut short by the ongoing violent ideology that the Party vowed to fight in 1966. The African American Library and Museum in Oakland is dedicated to sharing the history of Black life in the United States, and though a temporary installation, Revolutionary Grain adds a significant and illustrative chapter to African American history in this place of learning.

Institutions, including the FBI, mainstream media, and the prison industrial complex, form a particular, if not dominant, context for the Black Panther Party. However, those constituents aren’t the only physical or ideological spaces that frame the Party’s history. The seven anniversary exhibitions in Oakland, and those staged nationally and internationally, demonstrate the Party’s critical influence in the fight for social justice and the powerful results of a community that embraces its own story. This is power to, for, and by the People.

The World of the Black Panthers is on view at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism through January 5, 2016.

Survival Pending Revolution: Black Panther 50. Archival and Contemporary Musings on Love and Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar are on view at Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland through January 7, 2016.

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through February 12, 2016.

Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panthers in Portraits and Stories is on view at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland through February 28, 2016.

Installation view, UNEARTHED: Found + Made, 2015-2016. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

In the late 19th century, anthropologist Franz Boas rejected the methods of museological display that grouped objects by their typology. Boas dismissed the practice of creating an evolutionary progression between disparate cultural artifacts—an approach susceptible to scientific racism—and instead favored a contextual approach that placed objects together by their location, history, and culture. The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is a rare instance of a museum that takes such an approach toward art. The works in the museum’s collection are not displayed through a linear understanding of art history, but rather are arranged by their cultural concepts. Here, contemporary works are treated as a sliver of Californian history, positioned next to landscape paintings from the days of the Gold Rush. By using this methodology, OMCA reveals the timeless fixations that continue to preoccupy the region’s inhabitants and artists, highlighting the Californian landscape in particular, which has ceaselessly captured the public’s imagination.

Currently on view at OMCA, UNEARTHED: Found + Made looks toward the ground as a source of meditation. It’s the first in a series of future exhibitions that pair contemporary artists with niche cultural organizations around the Bay Area, furthering the museum’s anthropological approach. Curated by Christina Linden, UNEARTHED features works by Oakland-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar as well as artists from two local clubs, the California Suiseki Society and the San Francisco Suiseki Kai. Largely comprising found materials from the Californian landscape, the exhibited works transport viewers to far and distant lands that simultaneously lie on the earth’s surface and exist within the imagination.

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Willia Ette Graham, Johnnie Alberta Wade, and Arbie Williams. Mamaloo, 1992; denim, cotton flannel; 76 x 68 in. Courtesy of the Eli Leon Collection and the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: Terry Lorant.

On view at the Oakland Museum of California, Yo-Yos & Half Squares: Contemporary California Quilts presents a focused selection of quilts from the extensive collection of Bay Area quilter and collector Eli Leon. This exhibition emphasizes the playful and conceptual aspects of the form, centering on the improvisational aesthetics of the African American quilting tradition, and engages the vocabulary of the craft. Understated titles such as Four Patch Half Square Strip (1994), pieced by Rosie Lee Tompkins and quilted by Irene Bankhead, and Double Strip (n.d.), pieced by Mattie Pickett and quilted by Willia Ette Graham, draw on the quilting pattern used, yet the loose geometry and freewheeling combination of techniques listed sits in irreverent contrast to the precision and consistency often valued in conventional quilts. Unusual material choices abound, too. Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys, men’s ties, and lacy doilies are just some of the bits and pieces tethered into rhythmic schemas of pattern, texture, and color.

Many of these quilts were also produced in unconventional circumstances; they are collaborations, facilitated by Leon himself, between different quilters and piecers. Although multiple artists worked together on a single quilt, they may have worked years apart from each other, never meeting. For example, several works riff on a traditional britches quilt, a quilting technique that repurposes cast-off clothing into design elements. The central motif of Mamaloo (1992), made by Graham, Johnnie Alberta Wade, and Arbie Williams, is two pairs of flattened, deconstructed jeans. The surface undulates tightly with quilter Graham’s ranging stitch, making the quilt seem bodied—as if it might sashay off at any moment—but Graham chose to leave the pockets of the jeans open (in an instinctive understanding of Williams’s playful style). The result is casually humorous; this vestige of usefulness now winks out at the viewer. Mamaloo is indicative of a kind of meta-sensibility of the craft proposed in Yo-Yos & Half-Squares: quilting as both a sensitive and communal process. Quilts act as vehicles for near cosmic communication, in which ideas and aesthetics are held and transmitted between artists over time and space.

Unfinished (1996) by Tompkins best embodies the metaphorical power of these quilts. Glitter-edged applied decorations and jewelry crawl across the rich red velvet background, competing for space in their habitat. An exercise in both excess and patience, it was begun in 1968 and returned to often until completion in 1996. Its surface is layered, denoting the passage of time; less an object, and more of a record—of a life, of a way of being in the world—demonstrating a meditative and unhurried method, an expansive approach to materials, and the sheer delight in allowing a thing to become itself.

Yo-Yos & Half Squares: Contemporary California Quilts is on view at the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland through February 21, 2016.

Elena Harvey Collins is an artist, writer, and curator from London, England, currently in Santa Cruz, California.

Phoebe Osborne. God Sees Everything, November 7, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of the Artist and the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: Charlie Villyard.

In God Sees Everything, directed and choreographed by Phoebe Osborne, a complex weave of everything Californian coalesces. It is, in certain moments, “so L.A.” as dancers wearing the same blonde, bobbed wig move robotically across the stage. With glitter and glow sticks, God Sees Everything references the music-festivals scene, and with synchronized yoga postures and carrot eating it reaches toward new age. It also emerges from the numerous engagements with extraterrestrial life chronicled by individuals and cults within the state. God Sees Everything is all over the (western) map in terms of references, but each one of them is spot-on in terms of what epitomizes California. Osborne’s careful and sometimes absurd juxtapositions are both humorous and insightful; they point to a contemporary Californian identity that has been informed by a lengthy history of utopian projects.

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