power to the people

Faith Ringgold’s Black Panther Posters

BY MAURA CALLAHAN

For Faith Ringgold, the gendered hierarchies built into the Black Power movement were a continuous point of critique. Although the Black Panther Party relied on the labor of female members, men held most leadership positions. Despite the significant contributions of artists such as Barbara Jones-Hogu and poets like Nikki Giovanni, the public face of the Black Arts Movement was likewise predominantly male. Writing about the political and countercultural shifts of the late sixties in her 2005 memoir, Ringgold expressed her ambivalence toward the Black Power movement: “For me the concept of Black Power carried with it a big question mark. Was it intended only for the black men or would black women have power too?”1

Despite her reservations, Ringgold’s devotion to the cause of Black liberation never waned. In 1970—the same year she claimed she “became a feminist”—Ringgold produced two collaged posters to raise funds for the legal defenses of detained Black Panther Party members.2 But the predominantly white fundraising committee to whom Ringgold offered her work rejected them. While Ringgold’s posters were not reproduced as originally intended, their recent revival as serigraphs printed by master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton warrants a critical return to their significance in the context of the Black Power movement. Although the posters initially appear to operate squarely within the visual language of Black Power, Ringgold’s deployment of this language was more fragmented than coherent, and more productively tested than strictly observed.

Ringgold’s complex relationship to Black Power radicalism, as well as her unapologetically Black feminist position, is on full display in the poster depicting an armed Black family. On one hand, by literally weaponizing the family against the state, her design subverts the state’s exploitation of the nuclear family as a contained hierarchical unit in the service of capitalism. The child’s presence in the poster also serves as a reminder of the Panthers’ support of Black families, which included free breakfast programs, after-school education, and health services—initiatives intentionally obscured by the white mainstream media, which focused exclusively on the Party’s militancy. Ringgold does not downplay the important role of armed confrontation in the Panthers’ platform, but instead uses the image of a gun-carrying family to encapsulate both the Party’s controversial tactics and its undervalued community service.

In other ways, Ringgold’s representation of the Panthers departs from the Party’s official branding. Women and children carrying guns frequently appeared in visual media created by the party’s Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas. In these images, however, the mother is shown in an explicitly maternal position (i.e. holding or attending to the child), in the absence of a father. Knowing that the Black Panthers repudiated the nuclear family model, which Party co-founder Huey Newton condemned as “imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating,” Ringgold’s revolutionary family is unusual in its inclusion of a man, woman, and child together. They appear individually armed, in contrast to both the Panthers’ rejection of traditional family structures and their discontinuously paradoxical reinforcement of women’s subordination.3 The poster redresses the hierarchical and exclusionary tendencies of Black nationalism, visualizing Frances Beale’s call to action in her formative text “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” written the year before Ringgold designed her posters:

To relegate women to purely supportive roles or to simply cultural considerations is a dangerous doctrine to project. Unless black men who are preparing themselves for armed struggle understand that the society which we are trying to create is one in which the oppression of all members of that society is eliminated, then the revolution will have failed in its avowed purpose.4

Ringgold’s support for the Panthers transcends uncritical endorsement. By breaking away from the patriarchal doctrine which threatened to undermine the revolution’s efficacy, her poster affirms the Party’s fight for comprehensive liberation.

The transformation of Ringgold’s original collage posters to print in 2022 positions them within the narrative of printmaking as resistance. This is a history that extends back to the antiwar etchings of Francisco Goya (1746–1828), with whom Holton has compared Ringgold for their mutually “deep sense of public responsibility.”5

This is evident not only in Ringgold’s art, but also in the various protests she organized against racism and misogyny in the art world and beyond. Her insistence on recognizing both the promise and limitations of radical movements—artistic and otherwise—has solidified her unique, self-determined position within Black Power. In her posters, this vantage point materializes, and thanks to the reproductive power of print, has been realized once again.