Amar Gallery is proud to announce our exhibition Black Panthers & Revolution: Stephe Shames. This exhibition is the first London gallery show for Stephen Shames, the photographer of the Black Panther Party, whose archive of Panther images is the largest in the world. 

 

For the first time in London, Shames’ powerful civil rights images of Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Maya Angelou and Angela Davis amongst others will be on view at Amar Gallery.

 

At a time when racism is on the rise, we hope this exhibition serves as a reminder that equality has been a struggle for millions often suppressed due to race, gender or sexuality. Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, who co-authored a book with Shames, said of the tribulations the Black Pan- ther’s faced: “They came down on us because we had grassroots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we   crossed racial lines.” The people’s revolution, programmes and working coalitions were document- ed by Shames for years, protecting the legacy, history and spirit of the equal rights movement. 

 

In 1966, as the largely nonviolent Civil Rights movement swept through America, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the legendary Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The party burst onto the scene with a bold vision for social change and the empowerment of African Americans. During the height of the movement, from 1967 to 1973, photographer Stephen Shames, who was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, had unprecedented access to the organization. 

 

He captured not only its public face—street demonstrations, protests and militant armed postur- ing—but also life behind the scenes, from private Party meetings to Bobby Seale at work on his Oakland mayoral campaign. 

 

Stephen Shames’ images are in the permanent collections of over 40 international museums and collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; International Center of Photography, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; University of California's Bancroft Library, Berkeley; San Jose Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Mu- seum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.