New California Museum Exhibit ‘Revolutionary Grain’ Preserves Radical Activism Through Photography

Susanna Lamaina’s “Revolutionary Grain” photography exhibit opened at the California Museum on Saturday, June 14, only a block or so away from where protestors gathered for the No Kings Rally at the state Capitol. At the museum, a sea of 42 mid-key, full-scale black-and-white photographs depicting former Black Panther Party members as they are today served as a symbolic intersection between the past and present.

Almost 60 years earlier, black-and-white photos of the Black Panther Party marching into the same Capitol building holding rifles in one hand and law books in the other — protesting for their constitutional right to defend Black lives against state violence — spread across covers of major news publications that sensationalized them and exploited public fear. Today, during a time of widespread misinformation, the exhibit’s photos document and preserve a more nuanced memory of American activism.

Lamaina is of Mediterranean descent and grew up in a Southern Italian immigrant community in inner-city Philadelphia during the 1960s. She witnessed the Black Panthers serving children through their free lunch program, which was available to all children regardless of their race.

“We were seeing the work that they were doing firsthand,” Lamaina said during the opening of her exhibit. “So it wasn’t adding up to what the media was portraying on television or radio at that time.”

Lamaina studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and was mentored by Prof. Pirkle Jones and his wife, Ruth Marion-Baruch, who created“The Vanguard: A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers,”published in 1970. Both were white supporters of the movement who inspired Lamaina to create “Revolutionary Grain” in 2016.

Her journey to documenting the former Black Panthers was not without challenges. Some influential members initially turned down her first attempts at interviewing them.

“Knowing that it wasn’t going to be easy, knowing that I would have to explain to folks who I was and have them understand that I was coming from a place of educational inspiration, with a good word from former members of the party,” Lamaina said.

Many members of the Black Panther Party remain protective of their narrative. At the height of the Black Panther movement, the Black Panther newspaper served as a platform to disseminate their iconic message, “Power to the People,” and their curated images internationally.

Ericka Huggins, a former member of the Black Panther chapters in Los Angeles, Oakland and New Haven, Connecticut, who worked on the newspaper and was featured in “Revolutionary Grain,” provided insight into the power of the newspaper and why the U.S. government tried so hard to control the group’s image.

The Panthers publicized their work with Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, women’s and LGBTQIA liberation groups — Huggins thinks cross-coalition building was the real threat to the government.

“We were stalked by the police and the FBI,” Huggins said. “It was like being in the midst of a war that was not publicly declared, but we continued. Not only did we write the newspaper, add the photos, lay it out, put it to bed and send it to our national distribution office — the newspaper spread across the country; the government started sending people to post offices to water down our papers so that they couldn’t travel.”

In the past, political organizers like the Black Panther Party were often subject to intense government scrutiny, which included FBI counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO), especially when challenging systemic racism. Today, concerns persist about activism, including monitoring, portrayal in the media or suppression in digital spaces. This exhibit examines the seed planters of a historical revolution, long before the digital age, and what remains of them in the aftermath of the U.S. government’s political destabilization efforts.

For some former Black Panthers, the exhibit serves as a reflection on their work, which provided templates for initiatives such as free lunch programs, charter schools, health education and health screenings nationwide. Former Black Panther Gayle “Asali” Dickson, who served in the Oakland and Seattle chapters of the Party, said the exhibit helped her understand a part of her past that she had long denied.

“Between me leaving the party in 1976 and 2016, I was just underground in hiding. I was the only woman to draw for the back page of the Black Panther newspaper between 1972 and 1974, mostly drawing women and children,” Dickson said. “When I researched my work for the newspaper, I was reminded that we had a model of [an] intercommunalistic base of operations, showing the rest of the nation how to care for its citizens. I’m part of that, and so when she comes along at the same time to take those pictures, I’m learning how to talk about myself when I was in the Party, and discuss breaking the chains of oppression in this modern day.”

For Dickson and other former members of the Black Panther Party, the “Revolutionary Grain” portraits serve as a poignant reminder of the past while also affirming the legacy of the Black Panther Party.

“Revolutionary Grain” runs at the California Museum through Nov. 2.