Art as Resistance: A Conversation with Emory Douglas, Dread Scott, and Orlando Smith

For over six decades, three artists across three generations have used images to confront power, question how history is shaped, and reimagine what freedom looks like. Emory Douglas’s sixty-year career as a graphic artist began with his role as the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, for which he created the iconic visual language of the Black Power movement. Dread Scott’s often participatory works interrogate the ongoing legacy of racial oppression in America and seek to propel history forward. Orlando Smith, a self-described artivist, creates drawings and graphic novels with a journalistic approach to documenting the realities of incarceration, challenging injustice and imagining a more humane future from inside prison. This panel brings them together on the occasion of each having an exhibition currently on view in San Francisco: Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime at the African American Art & Culture Complex; Dread Scott: The Body Politic at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and O.Smith: Artivist at SFMOMA.

In this conversation, moderated by Bay Area artist and curator Rio Yañez, these three artists explore how art translates political urgency into image, how history and truth are constructed and dismantled, and how graphic storytelling becomes a tool for change.

About the Speakers

Emory Douglas is the definitive visual architect of the American Black Power movement. As minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 into the early 1980s, he translated the party’s Ten-Point Platform into bold, two-color graphics for The Black Panther newspaper, earning the nickname “Norman Rockwell of the ghetto” from Bobby Seale. Raised in San Francisco and trained in printing as a teenager, Douglas portrayed oppressed communities with dignity and helped shape the party’s iconic panther logo. His influence spans global liberation movements, from the Zapatistas to Black Lives Matter, with honors including the 2015 AIGA Medal and works held in the Museum of Modern Art and Tate.

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist whose art encourages viewers to reexamine ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork, and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. His artwork The All African People’s Consulate (2024) was included in the Venice Biennale and his art has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Walker Art Center. It is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was a 2023 Rome Prize Fellow.

Orlando Smith, a.k.a. O. Smith, is a graphic artist and self-described artivist who was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles. His illustrative reporting has been published in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Prison Journalism Project, and many other publications. Smith’s work has been featured in over two dozen exhibitions since 2017 at organizations that include the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Oakland Museum of California, (2021), the Berkeley Art Center, and the University of Derby in England. He is currently serving eight life sentences at California’s San Quentin State Prison under the draconian Three Strikes Law.

Rio Yañez is a Bay Area–based visual artist and curator. He is the co-curator of Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime, a survey of historic and contemporary works by revolutionary artist Emory Douglas. A curator of over 30 exhibitions, he frequently collaborated with his late father, René Yañez, and the pair developed exhibitions and programming together for 13 years. Yañez carries on his father’s tradition of curating the annual Dia de los Muertos exhibition at SOMArts alongside his collaborator Bridgett Rex. Yañez is also a founding member of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, the world’s first and most dangerous tortilla art collective.