Art, Politics, Activism, Oakland And Angela Davis

When the U.S. government came after Anglea Davis, art came to her defense. Targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as one of its “10 Most Wanted” in 1970, tracked down, jailed and accused of three capital crimes, artists and activists around the world rose to her defense. She would be found not guilty on all counts.

She would also be found as an inspiration to millions. Young African Americans searching for a fresh, dynamic face to represent their continuing fight against systemic racism and state sanctioned violence. Revolutionaries globally fighting capitalism.

She would also be found as an enemy. An enemy of “law and order” white nationalists, segregationists, social throwbacks. An enemy of the Governor of California (Ronald Regan), the Director of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover) and the President of the United States (Richard Nixon).

Angela Davis’ (b. 1944) extraordinary life, her campus activism, her involvement in the Black Power and feminist movements, her time on the run from the U.S. government and her unlikely victory on trial for her life, her time in the Communist party, her philosophy, her genius, her advocacy for abolishing prisons, her ascension to one of the nation’s most revered intellectuals and how art has backgrounded the journey comes together during “Angela Davis—Seize the Time,” an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California.

“Seize the Time” focuses specifically upon Davis and her image. Iconic images of a powerful, brilliant, forceful young Black woman, a revolutionary.

“I knew that the images of me, while they had something to do with me and who I was and what I’d done, I could never, as an individual, live up to the expectations that were forged in those images,” Davis told the Oakland Museum of California during an interview leading up to “Seize the Time.” “It took me a while to come to the conclusion that while those images are definitely of me–a younger me–they don’t necessarily represent me as an individual, they represent more the movement that was generated around the demand for my freedom. There was a time when I felt embarrassed, I really didn’t know how to be in the presence of those images, now I am pretty comfortable because I recognize that they represent the demands and aspirations of millions of people.”

Using the Angela Davis Archive in Oakland as the heart of the exhibition, visitors are given the opportunity to re-imagine the construction of the image of Davis as an icon of American Black radical resistance, female empowerment and a threat to the white patriarchal status quo. That construction was most famously the result of her “Wanted” poster which featured two photos of her.

“In one photo she has shades and an ‘ethnic’ patterned top. For the FBI and many of those who saw the poster, the image was of someone who was not ‘one of us,’ someone who was anti-American, a young Black woman who had rejected American norms by adopting a style that evoked African roots and shouted Black radicalism,” Lisbet Tellefsen, exhibition curator and owner/archivist of the Angela Davis archives collection, told Forbes.com. “The other photo positions her as a criminal, it appears to be a mugshot. It wasn’t, she had never been arrested, but by careful selection, cropping and retouching the FBI made her look like a criminal, someone who didn’t belong in white America. Placed together the images equate activism and Blackness with criminality. Given this framing it is not surprising that many people in a period of great social upheaval were alarmed by this terroristic image.”

The FBI wanted to panic white America with its representation of Davis as a Black radical. While that was successful, it did not anticipate the other reaction.

“The FBI had not foreseen that the ‘Wanted’ poster images also had a positive effect, turning Davis into a hero for young people all over the world,” Tellefsen explains. “Many of her supporters and many in the Black community saw these as images of a radical Black woman who was bravely resisting an oppressive government. The poster was flipped on its head, Davis was seen as someone who was being victimized and hunted by a racist state, someone who needed protection and support.”

Posters, paintings, flyers, video, photographs and objects created at the time, on view in the exhibition, share Davis’ widely reproduced and disseminated image as a youthful, energized activist. All the while wearing an Afro.

“Davis’s natural hair was important and divisive. As she says herself, she was one of many Black women adopting this style, she certainly wasn’t the first, but as the exhibition shows, she was the most visible Black woman of the time and the natural was a defiant assertion by Davis of distinctive Black standards of beauty,” Tellefsen said. “She looked stunning and powerful with a large Afro signifying Black pride and freedom. For white society, the Afro was all they could see. Countless other Black women with Afros were harassed by police who mistook them for Davis. For her supporters the look took on a life of its own, and in the exhibition you can see many variations of Davis’ Afro in French, English, German and Cuban posters.”

The Power of Art

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the relationship between art and politics,” Davis told the museum. “I know that the movements are often driven by music, by poetry, by visual art. Art is able to reach people in a way that didactic conversations often are not able. When I was a graduate student, I studied the relationship between aesthetics and politics… the ways in which art can produce knowledge, often knowledge of the sort that does not occur with a simple political speech.”

The creative mind and the different ways in which artists perceive the world allows for this.

“Art involves the imagination, and if we believe that revolutions are possible, we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations,” Davis said. “I think that art is actually crucial. Artists are at the forefront of social change. Artists often allow us to grasp what we cannot yet understand.”

Davis is excited about what she sees as a return of art to its role as societal change agent, the role it played during her time in the national spotlight.

“Over the last decades… artists have been more overtly political and have begun to give us a sense of the ways in which art enriches our ideas about change, about revolution,” she said.

Beyond the societal, art possesses a power on the personal as well.

“I feel most free when I am in the presence of great art with others,” Davis said. “When I’m at a concert hearing amazing music and aware of the fact that I’m in community with others who are having pretty much the same feeling. I think art teaches us how to feel free, how to feel free even as we are compelled to live under conditions of unfreedom.”

Angela Davis’ Legacy

“Seize the Time” positions Davis as a continuing touchstone for contemporary artists and activists.

“She is someone who the system couldn’t break despite its best efforts and someone who came out of her ordeal empowered by her experience and by the support of many thousands of individuals throughout the world,” Tellefsen said. “Today, young people of color fighting for racial and carceral justice revere her as an elder and an inspiration.”

How does she do it? What allows Davis to stay in the fight?

“I think it’s our job to do the work today that is not so much going to achieve the final goals that we might be imagining, but that will keep those goals alive and that we’ll be able to pass down from one generation to the next,” she said in her interview with the OMCA. “Oftentimes when people ask me why Black History in particular is important, I say that in many ways people of African descent in this hemisphere, in the Americas, are an inspiration to people fighting for freedom all over the world because it’s amazing that for 400, 500 years, the struggle is still going on and it has been passed down from one generation to the next. There are lulls, there are ebbs, but other times it erupts. It is important to imagine a future that we will never be able to actually witness, but we will be a part of it if we do the work that keeps these goals, these aspirations, alive.”

“Angela Davis–Seize the Time” can be seen at the Oakland Museum of California through June 11, 2023.