Emory Douglas
2023 Eureka Fellow
Emory Douglas describes himself as a visual communicator and a social justice artist. Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and has been a resident of the San Francisco California Bay Area since 1951. Douglas majored in commercial art at City College of San Francisco and considers himself a self-taught graphic designer.
Douglas became the Revolutionary Artist and The Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from the 1967 until 1981, during which time he created iconic images that were frequently seen on the front and back pages of the Black Panther Newspaper and reflected the politics of the Black Panther Party and its advocacy for addressing the needs of the community. Along with more recent artworks that Douglas creates, he also may remix some of his historic iconic graphic artworks in a more contemporary context to reflect today’s social issue concerns.
Since 2007, Douglas has had many retrospective exhibitions here in the United States such as at The African American Culture Complex in San Francisco, Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, MoMA, Los Angeles CA and the MoMA New York, de Young Museum San Francisco, plus many more art institutions and college campuses around the country. Since 2008 Douglas has had many exhibitions in countries abroad, such as Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Cuba, France, Algeria, Portugal, the UK, and Scotland.
Douglas has been honored with awards such as the AIGA Medal in 2015, the San Francisco Art Institute Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2019, and was inducted into The Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in New York City. Retrospectives of Douglas’ artwork have been published in Art in America, PRINT Magazine, American Legacy Magazine, Soul of The Nation, and the American Institute of Public Arts. There is a comprehensive retrospective collection of his graphic artwork from the 1960s and 1970s that was published in a 2007 book titled Black Panther, The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.
Douglas continues creating art that reflects social justice concerns of today.
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