Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season. Tickets include gallery access.
Blue and Black Panthers: The Visual and Material Solidarities of the Dalit Panthers and Black Panther Party
Padma Dorje Maitland
In his recent work, Archival Historicity/Dalit Panthers (2023), the Mumbai-based artist Vikrant Bhise archives ongoing Dalit experiences and activism to combat pervasive caste discrimination. Painted on the covers of the Dalit Panther Manifesto from 1973, the expanding series features a recurring Black Panther motif, the iconic symbol of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), founded in Oakland in 1966. The works accomplish a double narrative: They trace the history of the Dalit Panthers in India and the ways in which the Dalit Panthers sought to align themselves with the Black Panther Party. They also place the legacy of those histories within more recent movements, localizing events and calling to mind a longer record of international struggles as they play out in specific cities, locales, and regions. This talk considers the work of contemporary artists whose practices rearticulate and query ideological and aesthetic connections across race and caste as the basis for an art historical methodology not premised on geographic divisions but on visual and material affinities. In particular, it explores the idea of layers and palimpsests as the basis for more fluid forms of remembrance and calls to action.
Padma Dorje Maitland is the Malavalli Family Foundation Associate Curator, Art of the Indian Subcontinent, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He holds dual doctoral degrees in Architectural History and South Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and a MArch from Princeton. He has curated shows at BAMPFA, LACMA, Mia, and mostly recently co-curated After Hope: Videos of Resistance at the Asian Art Museum and Peabody Essex Museum. His publications include the edited volume Art, Hope, Action: Creative Praxis in Pandemic Times.