{"id":11335,"date":"2022-01-21T11:51:45","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T11:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=11335"},"modified":"2022-01-21T13:41:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T13:41:07","slug":"tales-from-the-basket-black-art-sketches-for-the-contemporary-art-lover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=11335","title":{"rendered":"Tales from The BASKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
By D. Amari Jackson<\/pre>\r\nThis week, we reach into the BASKET and pull out the Black Power-era rendering of Fred Hampton\u2019s Door by artist Dana Chandler…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Chicago. December 4, 1969. Just before dawn.<\/p>\r\n
A truck bearing a \u201cPeoples Gas\u201d insignia glides to a stop in front of a West Side apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe Street. Moments later, 14 plainclothes Chicago police officers make a stealthy exit from the vehicle, armed with a machine gun, shotgun, pistols, and a map of the apartment occupied by Illinois Black Panther Party leaders and their charismatic 21-year-old chairman Fred Hampton.<\/p>\r\n
At 4:30 a.m., all hell breaks loose as police kick in the front door and begin shooting. By the time they stop\u2014an eternal five minutes and 90 bullets later\u2014two Black Panthers are critically wounded and two are dead including Mark Clark and Hampton, the latter gunned down in his bed while lying next to his eight-months-pregnant fianc\u00e9e. Though Cook County state\u2019s attorney, Edward Hanrahan, subsequently claimed his officers were attacked by the Panthers as they tried to execute a warrant for illegal weapons, an eventual court case and a $1.85 million settlement to the families of Hampton and Clark would reveal what many suspected all along, as voiced by G. Flint Taylor, an attorney for the plaintiffs: \u201dThe settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the F.B.I. and Hanrahan’s men to murder Fred Hampton.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
But long before this 1982 court settlement, back in the months following the state-sanctioned massacre, artist-activist Dana Chandler protested Hampton\u2019s murder in paint with his 1970 rendering of Fred Hampton\u2019s Door<\/em>, a disturbing image of a bullet-riddled section of a blood-red door bearing a single star. The original painting was displayed in an April 1970 issue of Time Magazine<\/em> in an article about Black American artists before being exhibited then stolen four years later from Expo \u201974 in Spokane, Washington.<\/p>\r\n
Determined to further memorialize the slain leader, Chandler produced Fred Hampton\u2019s Door 2<\/em> in 1975, a full red and green door bearing bullet holes and a cluster of four stars arranged like an admiral\u2019s insignia. The painting was more recently featured in \u201cSoul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power\u201d at the Brooklyn Museum.<\/p>\r\n