Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 to confront the crisis of anti-black police violence in the Bay Area, the Black Panthers advocated armed struggle against the violences and aggressions of racist American imperialism domestically and internationally. Against interpretations that would deem their image-making to be secondary to their professed political agenda, merely a supplementary or propagandistic means by which to disseminate their worldview, this dissertation argues that aesthetic concerns were central to their militant politics. Panther artists and their sympathetic counterparts mobilized an arsenal of images, from political cartoons to feature-length films, to convey their organizational ambitions and orient the public to their committedly anti-racist and anti-imperialist perspectives. By focusing on the Panthers’ theorization, production, and circulation of their imagery, as well as their numerous creative collaborations, I offer a detailed and comprehensive analysis of their organizational development and evolving ideological positions. My attention to the materialization and spatialization of the Panthers’ revolutionary thinking in and through images clarifies what is seen and known of one of the most iconic political movements of the twentieth century. Far from an addendum to dominant art historical narratives about the American art and visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s, “Radical Aesthetics” recalibrates these histories as it traces how the Panthers’ artistic activities diverged from and explicitly critiqued what would be canonized as the most important interrogations of space, subjectivity, audience, and media in the period. Emphasizing that the Panthers pointedly situated their aesthetic contributions outside the institutional and discursive bounds of the art world, I assert the valence of their image-making for larger debates about art’s “site” and relationship to politics in the 1960s to the present.

Last modified

• 01/28/2019

Creator

• Erin E. Reitz

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2HX27

Subject

• Art History

Keyword

• Art History

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright