Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (New & Updated Edition)

By Emory Douglas

• Thousands of activists and revolutionaries have been inspired by the Black Panther’s and the Zapatistas' politics and graphics.


• The historical legacy of the Black Panther Party has only grown and the art and aesthetic of their struggle featured prominently in the uprisings for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor 


• Emory Douglas's work on the Black Panther newspaper has circulated widely in cultural and counter-cultural spaces. He is receiving greater recognition for the role his art played in shaping the look and politics of the Black Panther Party


• Douglas has had major exhibitions in Chelsea, major solo museum shows, his first, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (“Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas”), the New Museum and the Studio Museum, a influential monograph by Sam Durant


• This new edition will include further conversations with Emory Douglas and reflections on the collective work in Chiapas


• The work created as part of the Zapantera Negra encounter has been shown in museums, including Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language at LACE LA Contemporay Exhibitions 


• Douglas continues to share his knowledge with other generations and cultures—as he did here with the Zapatistas—which builds an audience and advocates for this book

• Language: English
• Publisher: Common Notions
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781942173632

Emory Douglas

Emory Douglas is former revolutionary artist and designer for the Black Panther Party.

Book preview

PREFACE

Marc James Léger and David Tomas

ZAPANTERA NEGRA IS A PROJECT defined by the social, cultural, and political experiences of several art activists who brought together the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers. The project coalesced around the alternative architectural site known as EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU [Where the United Nations Used to Be]), a centripetal community and artistic space of collective activities and freewheeling creation founded by Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow in 2009 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.

This book is a medium for those experiences as they reveal the various social spaces that are negotiated through Zapantera Negra, from the Black Arts Movement and the anticolonial, revolutionary politics of the Panthers, to Indigenous cosmology and the communal struggles of the Zapatistas. Voiced and refracted through interviews and personal recollections, and depicted through poetic fantasy and artistic self-determination, the different elements of this book come together to assert an optimistic resistance to social and cultural repression, economic austerity, and police impunity. The origin of this book was the presentation of Zapantera Negra at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, from June 21 to June 28, 2014. This exhibition, with its varied program of artworks, discussions, and workshops, unfolded in the context of Encuentro IX: MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas, organized by New York University’s Instituto Hemisférico de Performance & Política [Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics].

It was during this exhibition that we recorded a compelling and altogether out of the ordinary presentation by Emory Douglas, Saúl Kak, and Mia Eve Rollow. We consequently interviewed these three participants in EDELO’s Zapantera Negra, and they discussed the basis of their artistic collaboration in resistance and the myriad aspects of social and political engagement through culture. Their presentation is reproduced here in full as are the two interviews that we conducted with them at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. This material is complemented by the addition of a text by Rigo 23 and an interview with Caleb Duarte Piñon. After the first main section, a second section of documents allows for a comparison of the political platforms of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers with texts that reflect the various ways in which this political material has been translated into ideas concerning cultural production.

The book’s presentation and the interactions between interviews, source texts, and visual documents is designed to provide an experience that exceeds what one might expect from a straightforward documentary history. Its different elements detail a viable sociopolitical practice on the Left that opposes those that currently animate the contemporary neoliberal universe and its hegemonic consumer-based economies. In solidarity with its contributors, whose kind collaboration made this book possible, Zapantera Negra presents a heterogeneous, intergenerational road map for a transcontinental culture of creation, providing insights into the ways in which different traditions of political art and social activism can be fused together in the service of emancipatory social change.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Caleb Duarte Piñon with Mia Eve Rollow

Revolutionary art is a ceremony of freedom; it is larger than life. Oppressed and empowered communities worldwide practice its magic and hold secrets to its vibrance, using ceremonial ingredients as political weapons. As in ceremony, we relinquish our attachment to physical reality in order to gain enlightened foresight and knowledge; the Black and EZLN resistance create, as if they are living in a paradox, lucid dreams acting outside the confines of what we normally perceive to be possible. This type of detached perspective from the indoctrinated mindset is vital in order to see clearly: liberated vision. It is a theme that is uniquely and potently found in the people’s art.

Since the first encounter of Zapantera Negra at the end of 2012, the world has experienced an ongoing momentum of cultural and political changes that provide us with the evidence of how cultural shifts precede political change via strategic mass uprisings and an aesthetics of revolt. Both loud and soft images, actions, and public interventions, emerge from popular art. This last decade has given rise to white supremacist ideology, to white nationalism, neonazism, and fascism. We have witnessed the Muslim ban; the separation of families and the imprisonment of children in cages along the US-Mexican border; a global pandemic that has unnecessarily killed millions of people across the world; the Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock protests; the Syrian Civil War and the Afghan refugee crises. But here, we do not focus on the polarization that transpired between 2016 and 2021, particularly within the political arena, but rather, we focus on the beautiful proof of how a significant cultural shift was sparked by poetic acts of disturbance.

Emory Douglas at Comparte, Universidad de la tierra, Caracol Oventic, Chiapas, México, 2016. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

Slumil K’ajxemk’op

On October 5th, 2020, the EZLN published their communiqué in which they announced an invasion of the European continent via land, sea, and air. Their voyage began on April 10, 2021, on a sailboat named La Montania and with their maritime delegation named Escuadrón 421 [Squadron 421] composed of four cis women, two cis men, and one transgender nonbinary person: Lupita, Carolina, Ximena, Yuli, Bernal, Felipe, and Marijose. After a forty-seven-day trek across the Atlantic, they set foot on European soil and renamed the continent Slumil K’ajxemk’op, meaning Rebel Land in Tzotzil Mayan. They were later joined by a larger Zapatista delegation arriving by plane and would travel to over thirty places across Europe.

El Escuadrón 421. La Parole Errente, Paris, France, 2021. Photo by Mia Eve Rollow.

This voyage to Europe was seen as a reversed process of conquest. The idea of an inverse invasion aims to unlock a parallel universe in order to imagine new and exciting forms of social and economic structures, far from the violent capitalist legacies and arrangements based on the accumulation of wealth, conquest, and exploitation. But the intent of the Zapatistas was not to pillage, claim victim, or repeat the tired narrative of classifying the West as evil. On the contrary, the Zapatistas set foot in Europe to let it be known that, as Subcomandante Galeano states, they have not conquered us, that we continue to resist, and we are in fact in open rebellion. The Zapatistas planned meetings with groups throughout Europe that share the movement’s anticapitalist and environmental values. These groups included feminist collectives, migrant support initiatives, and climate justice movements.

This form of theater is not new to Zapatismo. In fact, the Zapatistas remain one of the most effective storytellers and myth creators of our time. They have created the most astonishing piece of theater, employing surrealism, poetry, and a rich visual language in order to illustrate the construction of their own realities, where the body is centered, not through an individualistic lens, but through a collective understanding of the body’s relationship with the earth. This language dismantles the logic of capitalism and presents theatrical acts as evidence for other ways of being.

The Aesthetics of Revolt

A movement like no other took hold of peoples’ imaginations in the summer of 2020, inflaming major cities across the United States. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson sparked a week of protests that catapulted the Movement for Black Lives into the national spotlight, which was reignited in the summer of 2020 when George Floyd was publicly executed by Minneapolis police, raising awareness of the anti-Blackness that undergirds policing in the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and so many others.

Small businesses and large corporations protected their windows from unrest and potential looting by installing temporary plywood skins, illustrating a moment of closure due to a global pandemic that emerged alongside the ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement. The boarded-up windows exposed the myths of a capitalist culture pertaining to stability, opportunity, prosperity, social mobility, and progress. Yet the plywood shields became canvases for local artists and community members whose images displayed the diversity, cultural richness, and poetry of the movement. The aesthetics of revolt emerged, presenting an emblazoned celebration of resistance, endurance, and of communities’ self-determination, empowerment, and hope.

Walking the Beast. Sculptural Performance, Suchiate River, Guatemala-México border. In collaboration with Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, Tapachula Chiapas, México, 2014. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

In addition, we saw a transvaluation of American mythology around its honored public figures. Statues, such as those of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee or America’s discoverer, Christopher Columbus and Father Junipero Serra, were ignominiously toppled. Video projections, paintings, poetic texts, altars, and processions, were employed by revisionist artists to dismantle the false, whitewashed version of American history, promulgated in textbooks shaped by the tastes of southern school boards. The physical body was also used in direct action over the objects that proclaimed to hold our collective memories; the body in rage, the body in protest, in mourning, was used to create a new memory in public view, echoing the aesthetics of the Black Panther Party as if time had folded and unified these two distinct moments in US history.

Water Protectors

A few years earlier, in April 2016, an Indigenous movement centering its struggle on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation began with an encampment on LaDonna Brave Bull Allard’s land. The movement was inspired by elders such as Josephine Mandamin, who was a survivor of the Canadian Indian residential school system and founder of the Mother Earth Water Walkers (Water Protectors). Throughout her life, she walked over 25,000 miles around bodies of water in North America while carrying a bucket of water. This lifelong ritual, among others, served to create the momentum at Standing Rock where occupation, protest, art, ritual, and ceremony, inspired a new generation of water protectors.

The Embassy of the Refugee. Tijuana, México. Sculptural performance with six families living in El Chaparral refugee tent city, 2021. Photo by Mia Eve Rollow.

Interior. And if I devoted all of my life to one of its feathers? Joint: exhibition of Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen, Austria, Vienna, 2021. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

The Embassy of the Refugee. Tijuana, México. Sculptural performance with six families living in El Chaparral refugee tent city, 2021. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

As the moral and ecological bankruptcy of the capitalist class becomes evident, Indigenous peoples who have challenged the colonial paradigm of resource extraction and plunder are being vindicated. Movements of resistance in the Brazilian Amazon, Ecuador, Canada, and New Zealand, have played an important role in protecting the land in which they live. According to a 2021 joint study conducted by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and the International Labour Organization, Indigenous peoples are responsible for protecting 22 percent of the earth’s surface and 80 percent of its biodiversity.

The Embassy of the Refugee. Tijuana, México. Sculptural performance with six families living in El Chaparral refugee tent city, 2021. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

The people’s power is harnessed from an Indigenous-rooted, enlightened viewpoint derived from our intrinsic rights to be a flourishing species; this is the heart of Zapantera Negra’s inspired look at the use of artistic power seen within the select happenings above. Our dreams have been the greatest threat to the security of the colonizer’s regime, the power of our ability to create a better world is palpable and real, because only with liberated vision can we both imagine and garner the wisdom and strength to get there. Our medicine is within every discipline and culture, the secret within the flower. Zapantera Negra is one small speck of dust in the great vistas of people’s art, showing us the beauty we have and can attain.

By closely looking at the Black Panther Party and the Zapatista’s understanding of art, as well as other political and social movements of today, such as Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, we pose these questions:

How can simple acts using the body and objects, such as walking and carrying water for endless miles, inspire social transformation?

How does the painting of plywood and the poetic dismantling of monuments set in motion the restructuring of a nation’s memory?

How does the renaming of an entire continent bring ideas of alternative realities into existence?

And when does the absurd, the theatrical, and the poetic challenge the hard evidence of economic and military power?

As artists and the EDLEO collective, we continue to use objects, either fabricated or found, as sculpture; and we situate the body in ceremony, and sights of social and political conflict as stage. We have created cardboard houses and burned them at the feet of the US-Mexican border in collaboration with families seeking asylum living in makeshift refugee camps in Tijuana Mexico. We have carried long exaggerated pink ladders across urban areas in Oakland created by unaccompanied minors who arrived at the US Mexico border._ We have imagined fictional space as the Embassy of the Refugee as a moving nomadic creative space for asylum seekers.

Within this work, we do not create for the purpose of exhibiting, nor are we directing a film, or acting. We are creating sculptural public interventions through a shared authorship. Our documentation is simply the residue of a shared experience that begins to shape our reality. With this art making, we are free from formats and categories of cultural production to reimagine the political and social organizing of our laws and social behaviors. We are providing physical evidence of resistance and survival that is manifested in the US-Mexico border and other areas of conflict. Our memories are fragile and can be deceiving. If we do not exercise a living memory through artistic cultural acts and initiatives, we lose our collective strength. That is what Zapatismo and the Black Panther legacy gives us. Zapantera Negra gathers the residue of these encounters and presents them to the world, to propose, to give seed to seemingly unattainable realities.

The Embassy of the Refugee. Frankfurt, Germany. TinyBe: Living in a Sculpture. Artist Ambassadors: Mina Afshar-Saheb-Ekhtiari, Khaled Al Salamh, and Mari Martinez, 2021. Photo by Caleb Duarte.

INTRODUCTION

EDELO

IN 1994 THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING, a Mexican Indigenous movement from the southern state of Chiapas, produced and leveraged a new form of revolutionary communication through the Internet. The distribution of information, actions, images, and video spread throughout the world in real time, bringing awareness while building solidarity for what the New York Times called the first postmodern revolution. Positioning itself as a struggle against neoliberalism and waged against five hundred years of oppression, Zapatismo has employed new technologies of information distribution in order to articulate its wants and beliefs to a global audience.

In the fall of 2009, over one hundred displaced Indigenous community members occupied the offices of the United Nations, located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. The offices were taken over in the hope of gaining international attention from humanitarian organizations. After a few months of the occupation, the United Nations simply decided to find another building and moved.

A few months later, Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte Piñon, disillusioned with institutional art and wishing to believe that art can be a radical form of communication, moved into the building and established an experimental art space and international artist residency for diverse practices. We invited artists, activists, cultural workers, inventors, gardeners, PhDs, jugglers, and educators to take part in creating an experiment in art and social change. Disenchanted with the linear path of art history, these artists came to EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU [Where the United Nations Used to Be]) in favor of art as a vehicle for social transformation. Inspired by the Zapatista uprising, where words and poetry are used to inspire a generation to imagine ‘other’ possible worlds, EDELO retained the name of the UN office as part of an investigation into how art, in all its disciplines and contradictions, can take the supposed role of such institutional bodies to create understanding, empathy, and to serve as a tool for imagining alternatives to a harmful and violent system that we do not have to