Artspace Returns To The Revolution

We know the subjects of the paintings are protestors because of the crowds assembled behind them, silhouettes gathered with raised arms and picket signs. One carries a bullhorn. Another has the Puerto Rican flag emblazoned on a tank top. Another throws a fist in the air to reveal a tattoo on the wrist.

As the accompanying notes say, ​“New Haven painter and activist Kwadwo Adae celebrates his compatriots and heroes” in these series of portraits.

The subjects are Kerry Ellington, Addys Castillo, Norm Clement, Ericka Huggins, Sarah Pimenta, and Vanessa Suárez. Adae has depicted them in their ​“protest armor.”

In putting them side by side by side, Adae deftly connects past to present. He shows that the protests of 1970 over the Black Panther trials in New Haven have cast a long shadow, and suggests further that they are part of a continuum, an even longer thread stretching back perhaps to the beginnings of the country.

Adae’s portraits are part of Revolution on Trial: New Haven’s Black Panthers at 50, an exploration of the legacy of the Black Panther trial. Curated by La Tanya S. Autry and Sarah Fritchey, the exhibit is no retrospective. Utterly timely, sharp, and inquisitive, it draws its power from both going local and reaching for the universal, leaving viewers with a lot to think about and possibly preparing them for action to make things better.

That starts by looking at the complexity beneath and around the trial. It was a murder trial, but it was about so much more.

The exhibit runs at Artspace through Oct. 17.

As noted in a previous Independent article marking the 50th anniversary of the protests, ​“Black Panthers took a man they had tortured in this basement room, drove him to a swamp, and shot him dead — thrusting New Haven into a national confrontation over race and justice that resonates today.” (Read that piece here for more background.) That confrontation and continued resonance are not only because of the murder of Alex Rackley, who was wrongly suspected of being an FBI informant. Panthers Warren Kimbro and George Sams pleaded guilty to the crime, and a third Panther, Lonnie McLucas, was also convicted. But ​“the federal government, out to destroy the party’s leadership, put national Chairman Bobby Seale and local organizer Ericka Huggins on trial for conspiracy The prosecutor sought the death penalty.” Years of protests followed. The FBI illegally monitored, harassed and sought to destroy the party through an extra-legal effort called COINTELPRO. On May Day 1970, as activists from around the country converged on the city, businesses were boarded up. The National Guard patrolled the streets. The threat of total chaos loomed. And a legacy was begun that the city and country are still wrestling with.

Artspace’s exhibit shows how that legacy has played a part in shaping New Haven, the nature of its community organizing and activism, and the strength of its protests over today’s social justice issues — many of them all too similar to the issues confronting the country in 1970.

After Adae’s visual portraits, artist Melanie Crean offers portraits of another kind, of nine Black, Brown, and indigenous women — Diane Brown, Beatrice Codianni, Sharon Dickey, Kerry Ellington, Debbie Elmore, Barbara Fair, Hanan Hameen, and Hope Metcalf — who are community leaders in New Haven. The accompanying notes explain that the women were engaged in creating a collaborative performance. Then Covid-19 intervened. ​“In the interim,” the notes say, ​“the artist has asked the innovators to record their interpretation of various terms associated with liberation.”

Crean’s pivot pays off. The simple pieces of paper pinned to the wall of the Artspace gallery look almost like discarded pages from a manuscript of a poem or a play. Crean doesn’t label who said what, making the voices feel that much more universal. The pages tell stories of ​“a mass of people putting their bodies on the line … getting the system to actually move that mountain.”

Another participant’s thoughts on solitary confinement in prison resonate with quarantine: ​“The image that I have right now is someone doing push-ups in their cell, as just a way of trying to stay focused and grounded.” Another talks of visiting a gathering of women artists that taught her that ​“we can achieve all these things that we are envisioning, that we are dreaming up, and that world that can exist while we’re alive … you don’t have to be told by the older generations, not in this lifetime, not in your lifetime. Right, it actually can happen in my lifetime. I got to see that.” The participants’ dispatches from the front lines of activism could apply to 1970 or 2020 in equal measure.

Alex Callendar’s piece delves into the history of housing in New Haven and comes up with something that has elements of both sarcasm and menace. The use of wallpaper already comes across as a comment on the perhaps foiled aspirations of White middle-class families of a generation or two before; as the notes point out, ​“traditionally this fabric often showcases images of othered people in so-called ​‘exotic’ landscapes.” Callender turns those ideas inside-out, as his recurring motifs are about the housing situation as it was and is. If we think of wallpaper as something used now and again to hide a problem — anything from a stain to damning evidence of a structural defect in a wall — Callender reminds us of the delusion inherent in that. Sooner or later, we have to deal with the problem head-on.

Artist and San Juan, Puerto Rico, native Miguel Luciano’s piece consists of 10 shields the artist made for protestors to use for protection during demonstrations. As the accompanying notes relate, ​“last year nearly half a million demonstrators filled the streets of downtown San Juan calling the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rossello due to corruption.” The governor was indeed ousted, but meanwhile, as the artist notes, ​“hundreds of schools have been closed in Puerto Rico in recent years due to debt crisis austerity programs, Washington neglect and local corruption, natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes), and shifting populations.” Luciano got the material to make the shields from decommissioned buses after a quarter of Puerto Rico public schools closed, pre-Covid-19. The shields, he wrote, are intended to ​“protect those fighting for the future of our children’s education, and for our right to be self-determined, and free.”

Black Panther Ericka Huggins — who took part in Rackley’s interrogation, was jailed during the trials, and was held for two years until charges were dropped — is a major subject of both video installations in the exhibit. In Ice The Beef’s I Am You, performers Ronisha Moore, Elaine Lester, Arianna Rivera, Catherine Wicks, Priscilla Adopo, and Nyrobi Vargas recite poems Huggins wrote while incarcerated in Niantic. Chloé Bass’s A hand that held and loved someone (Personal Choice #3) uses footage of Huggins and the demonstrations to humanize the subject.

Both videos also serve as a bridge to the archive room, structured around the exhibit’s accompanying podcast that was launched in May (listen to that podcast here). Using the podcast — created by Mercy Quaye’s Narrative Project — as a spine and amplifying it with photos and books, the archive does much to illustrate what the Black Panther Party was about.

For those who might still think of the Black Panthers as simply a militant group, or those who have never gone deeper than the iconic photo of co-founder Huey Newton in a chair with a rifle, the archive will be eye-opening. It highlights the party’s social service work, including its Free Breakfast for Children program, and its emphasis on social justice. It points out that the concerns that motivated the Black Panthers then — the ideas that seemed so dangerous — echo the concerns that have gotten people out into the streets now.

That the problems of racism and inequality have proven so persistent is the sorrow at the heart of this exhibit, and that sorrow is given voice by Paul Bryant Hudson. Backed up by Jeremiah Fuller and Trey Moore, Hudson’s soundtrack incorporates speeches, piano, drums, and Hudson’s own powerful singing to create moods that shift from Marvin Gaye-inspired grooves to just voice and piano. His music speaks to the powerful suggestion that one reason the Black Panther trials have resonated for so long is that they were a moment of revelation — a moment when the veneer of society was stripped off and people got to see what it really looked like, and what their place was in it. We are living through a similar moment now, and one lesson lies in understanding just how little has changed. Can we do something about that now? Can we get it right this time?

​“Revolution on Trial” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through Oct. 17. Visit its website for hours and more information.