Emory Douglas

Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at age eight he moved to San Francisco, California. At age 13, he was sentenced to 15 months at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California, where he worked in the juvenile correctional facility's printing shop and learned the basics of commercial printing.

In 1960, Douglas studied graphic design at the City College of San Francisco. He joined the college's Black Students’ Association and worked closely with Amiri Baraka, a voice in the black arts movement, to design theatre sets.

By researching Douglas I am able to further look into protests and social issues of race; however, compared to Mark Wallinger, Douglas represents the action of self-defence during protests instead of peaceful ones.

Douglas asked to join the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1967 after meeting co-founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale at the Black House, a political/cultural centre in San Francisco created by author Eldridge Cleaver, playwright Ed Bullins, and Willie Dale.

“I (Douglas) was drawn to it (the Black Panther Party) because of its dedication to self-defence. The Civil Rights Movement headed by Dr King turned me off at that time, for in those days non-violent protest had no appeal to me. And although the rebellions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark were not well organized they did appeal to my nature. I could identify with them.” —Emory Douglas

Douglas drew a lot of inspiration from third world struggles and used art as the primary method of propaganda and outreach. His graphics served to promote the Party's ideologies, which were inspired by the rhetoric of revolutionary figures such as Malcolm X and Che Guevara. His images were often very graphic, meant to promote and empower black resistance with the hope of starting a revolution to end institutionalized mistreatment of African Americans.

Douglas was the most prolific and persistent graphic agitator in the American Black Power movements. Douglas profoundly understood the power of images in communicating ideas ... Inexpensive printing technologies—including photostats and press-type, textures and patterns—made publishing a two-colour heavily illustrated, weekly tabloid newspaper possible. Graphics production values associated with seductive advertising and waste in a decadent society became weapons of the revolution. Technically, Douglas collaged and re-collaged drawings and photographs, performing graphics tricks with little budget and even less time. His distinctive illustration style featured thick black outlines (easier to trap) and resourceful tint and texture combinations. Conceptually, Douglas's images served two purposes: first, illustrating conditions that made revolution seem necessary; and second, constructing a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized. Most popular media represents middle to upper-class people as "normal." Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto, concentrating on the poor and oppressed. Departing from the WPA/social realist style of portraying poor people, which can be perceived as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas's energetic drawings showed respect and affection. He maintained poor people's dignity while graphically illustrating harsh situations.

This digital piece represents the style of Emory Douglas and his message shown in his work of revolution and uprise to suppression of black communities. In recent times this ideology has come into fruition once more causing uprising and defiance. However, this time the protests are less violent than those portrayed by Douglas in the 70s. I composed these pieces with similar colour schemes and features to the pieces done by Douglas. The features include back and white photos of the main subject (in this case the model) and the powerful image of the protests behind which took place in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd. Also, the style similarly represents that of Douglas’ work with the strips of colour and message of violent protests through the imagery of weapons. However, in the case of my work I tried to emulate the softness of Fairey’s propaganda while still conveying the message of solidarity and unity of the movement.

Moving onward I want to look at a medium that is more tactile yet simple to interpret my idea of creating a propaganda poster in light of the work I have displayed and experimented with throughout my project. In addition to this, I have decided to stay on the route of peace instead of the more violence-based work of Douglas and in the future, I will stick to sharing a message of peaceful protests like those I have based my work on previously. In order to create a more physical take on my work, I aim to carry out several prints and paper cut-outs which will be edited digitally as I feel they can display the complexity and vibrance of the intended message while remaining simple in the sense of the style of work.

These prints represent my experiments over 5 layers of colour in the style of Douglas in preparation for my final piece. As I am inspired by the recent protests and movement, I aim to maintain the expressive nature of work done by Fairey and Douglas while still displaying a strong message. In my poster, my ambition is to use a mix of media including mostly digital, prints, paints, photographs and paper cut-outs. This will allow me to reference the artists I have explored previously, such as Peter Chadwick for his use of digital experiments with buildings and colour, Shepard Fairey and Emory Douglas for their propaganda-style prints, Joshua Miels for his abstract layered approach to portrait painting, Lucien Hervé for his powerful greyscale building photography and Paul Catherall for his simplistic, colourful paper cut out pieces. The poster will act as an attribute to the final piece with the main outcome being displayed as a series of photographs of the poster in places previously visited throughout my project.

“To bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try”- Rosa Parks

These edits of a paper cut piece show again the link of colours and style to both Fairey and Douglas in order to experiment leading up to resolving a final poster linking all features learnt from artists and my own recordings. This simple piece is however married with a quote from the famous equality activist and hero Rosa Parks. I decided to add this quote to link to the artist Tom Phillips whom I looked at previously as he incorporated important quotes and writing to his work.