College of Marin hosts Emory Douglas lecture, exhibit on social justice

Decades worth of social justice and liberation visions as seen through Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, are on display at College of Marin.

Douglas, 80, a San Francisco resident, has mounted an exhibit of 45 graphic art drawings and prints that runs through Friday at the college’s fine arts gallery. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and is adjacent to the James Dunn Theatre on the west side of the Kentfield campus.

Douglas, joined by artist and activist Melanie Cervantes, will speak at a free event from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the theater. Douglas’ daughter, poet Meres-Sia Gabriel, and musician Joan Tarika Lewis, also will perform. Register at emorydouglas.eventbrite.com.

“What I deal with is to show the spectrum of social justice, from the pleasant to the unpleasant,” Douglas said. “It’s about sharing social justice concerns, to enlighten and inform those issues.”

The COM events coincide with the commemoration of the October 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In 1967, Douglas, through the Black Panther Newspaper, began communicating his representations of resistance, self-determination and Black liberation in ink drawings, photos and paintings that have led to an archive of more than 5,500 prints, he said.

He has exhibited his work in dozens of shows all over the world, and in a 2007 book, “Black Panther, The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas,” now in its third edition.

The art exhibition is co-sponsored by COM’s Umoja Equity Institute, and the Umoja Learning Community, which together offer support and assistance to students of all ethnicities in accessing resources such as tutoring or other help.

It has been one of the most-visited events ever in the gallery, according to Walter Turner, a College of Marin social sciences professor and department chair who has known Douglas for many years.

“We’ve not walked by here, in the month the exhibit’s been here, that there haven’t been students in here,” Turner said. “At this point, we’ve had maybe 20 or more class visits come here.”

Turner is coordinator of College of Marin’s three-year-old Umoja Equity Institute and the six-year-old Umoja Learning Community.

“We’re basically the institution’s equity body,” Turner said of the institute.

Colleen Mihal, a COM professor and chair of the communications department, is co-coordinator with Turner of the Douglas exhibit and of the Umoja community. She said she sees students being empowered by the messages in the prints.

“We wanted to honor Emory’s contribution to the struggle,” Mihal said of the exhibit and lecture. “He’s so iconic, he’s so gracious in everything he does.”

Students at the gallery on Wednesday agreed.

“I think it’s a dope exhibit,” Cobi Wilson, 22, a College of Marin student, school basketball player and a helper with the Umoja community. “Just what the pieces look like and what the message is.”

Wilson, an Oakland resident, said it seemed that Douglas “uses history, with his own style of art, to preach about Black Power, but also using big moments of Black Liberation and history — and brings it together in his own way.”

For Josh Compton, 21, of Novato, a COM student and a peer mentor with the Umoja community, Douglas’  underlying message is to “show America the real history of the Black Panther Party,” he said.

“A lot of people get misconstrued about the Black Panther Party and think that they were just some malicious people that carried around guns,” he said.

“In fact, they were a group that actually cared about community, and the Black America community, and what America promised us.”

Brenda Gomez, 28, of Corte Madera, who was attending the exhibit Wednesday with her College of Marin English as a second language class, said Douglas’ exhibit was meaningful to her.

“It’s very important, for the people in the past, they have a hard life,” she said.

“Sometimes with a race or color, when it’s different, sometimes it’s very hard,” Gomez said. “When people come to a different country, it’s difficult to be here and start again.”