Awards
2010 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks
Emory Douglas (photograph by Jos Wheeler, Auckland, New Zealand)
The panel unanimously agreed to give the Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work to two artists who have long challenged the art world’s boundaries and received definitions in different but historically important ways. While working on opposite coasts and in different mediums, Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks transformed how African American people saw themselves, and how they were seen. Through their championing of diverse communities and individuals that mainstream society had long rendered invisible or misrepresented, they confronted the deep divisions and inequities running through American society. Emerging during the mid-1960s, at a time of intense social upheaval, Hendricks and Douglas maintain practices that are confrontational and incendiary, subversive and sly. The artists’ steadfast defiance of expectations functioned as a powerfully liberating force in their work, as well as an inspiration to younger artists. More than commercial success, dignity was what guided them in their decisions. Thus, while Douglas worked outside the confines of the art world, Hendricks worked inside it without succumbing to the pressures and proscriptions against painting, particularly observational painting and (to go one step further) portraiture.
From 1967 until 1980, Douglas was the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary artist and minister of culture. An artist of considerable power, he advanced the cause of justice for African Americans during a tumultuous period; his cartoons and posters are among the most iconic political images of the era. Trained as a graphic artist at City College of San Francisco, Douglas applied his considerable talents to the Black Panther newspaper, which he designed and illustrated from the first issue. His work redefines and extends a tradition that includes such figures as Honoré Daumier, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Käthe Kollwitz. His community-based art changed in content and form over the course of the Black Panthers’ history. From his early drawings of pigs symbolic of a repressive police and state authority to his depictions of African American women and children living in rat-filled squalor, and from his devastating photomontages of a triumphant Richard Nixon to his hopeful imagery of the Panthers’ Survival Programs dedicated to education and accessible healthcare, Douglas adapted the style and medium of his art to the issue at hand. His abiding concern has been the promotion of social justice. If an artist can indeed have a social impact, Douglas is such an artist. “Dangerous pictures,” as Sam Durant, one of the curators of the New Museum exhibition Emory Douglas: Black Panther, describes them, “they were meant to change the world.”
Barkley L. Hendricks (photograph by Duke Photography)
For more than forty years, Hendricks has painted, among other things, powerful portraits of urban African Americans as well as candid self-portraits. Trained at the Yale School of Art during a period of abstraction’s dominance, he enlisted a realist idiom to paint the people he knew. Omitting gratuitous details, he typically depicted his subjects against monochromatic fields and thus conveyed, by means of this classically modernist convention, the character and individuality of his sitters. As Trevor Schoonmaker observes in one of the catalogue essays for Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, his recent traveling retrospective: “They are people with a distinctive style, personality, and attitude that caught his attention and inspired a creative response. Their pose and accoutrements received as much attention as they did. But to mainstream society of the 1970s, these images were both visually and conceptually loaded and thus potentially dangerous.”
By paying so much attention to his sitters’ personal attributes, Hendricks achieved an unlikely frisson in his paintings, calling attention to the ways in which cultural difference might be understood—and therefore deployed and co-opted—via style. In doing so, he underscores that mainstream society and mass media are always trying absorb the vernacular of the unassimilated without ever truly opening doors. As his in-your-face nude self-portrait, complete with numerous telling habiliments, makes evident, we are never truly naked because each of us is seen within a cultural context.
Rather than succumb to, adapt to, or be cowed by repressive contexts, Douglas and Hendricks sought to overthrow them through loaded images. They developed powerful representations through their attention to detail and commitment to being explicit. For them, the body and the body politic are neither abstractions nor separate realms. And yet, what comes through all of their work is passion, the need to tell the truth of their circumstances, to give testimony.
Jury: Johanna Burton, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, chair; James Meyer, Emory University; and John Yau.
