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Telling Tales Edition: Towards a Revolutionary Black Gaze, by Ekundayo Igeleke
- Boston Ujima Project
- 2 hours ago
- 10 min read
Ekundayo Igeleke, Black Men Build’s Director of Political Education & Culture, lays out a new formulation for understanding Black narratives and Black art that speak to Black audiences from within Black movements. The Revolutionary Black Gaze wills us towards action, guides us in worldmaking, and refuses objectification.
“Poetry alone cannot change the material conditions of an unjust society, but I challenge anyone to name a substantive freedom movement that does not have poetry.” - Aja Monet
Art and cultural production remain critical elements of liberation struggles and social movements. Art has historically served as a means of cultural resistance for oppressed people, whether through collective action or individual expression. Author and activist Toni Cade Bamabara, in Conversations with Toni Cade Bamabara, offers:
"I start with the recognition that we are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp over which economic/political/social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It’s not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsoever’s benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family, and the human family is to try to tell the truth."
Culture workers are on the frontline of telling truths on the battlegrounds of culture, ideas, imagination, and knowledge production. While many artists have obsessed over the immaterial needs of their people (Monet, 2023) — the emotional resonance, the decolonizing of the mind and spirit, and the powerful affects produced by such struggles — works created in response to the spontaneity of violence are inherently responsive and reactive. I believe that the “people’s'” cultural power is best demonstrated when it is attached to a campaign or movement toward a particular goal that ends with a shift in power relations between the ruling and the working class. I posit that work made by Black artists in this context fulfills a Revolutionary Black Gaze; this gaze is a potent visual, literary, and sonic framework that consciously rejects commodified, consumable representations of Blackness crafted for a white and/or colonial gaze. Instead, it centers fugitivity, international solidarity, and a Black radical imagination. It is not merely an oppositional strategy, but an active form of world-making that is inherently both political and aesthetic. It demands that the consumer move beyond passive spectatorship and toward collective transformation.
For instance: Marshall Shorts’ Rest During Wartime (2024) is a powerful contemporary intervention into the long tradition of art in service of social movements. The 18” x 24” six-color hand-drawn screenprint, produced by UprightPress on richly textured French Midnight Shift paper, operates on multiple levels: as an object within an object (first composed as an illustration within a WARTIME magazine), as a component of political pedagogy, and as a direct link to a revolutionary aesthetic. The work’s central figure is a Black man captured in a moment of profound presentedness, with eyes closed yet looking toward the sky, toward the future. He is not merely an individual subject, but a symbolic representation of collective endurance. His weariness is relatable, suggesting the fatigue of a long journey and the constant psychological toll of navigating a world in conflict, yet, his posture remains one of resilient fortitude. The image highlights that we are at war, that the United States are at War with Black America, and that our soldiers, as tired as they may be, continue to struggle forward. This resilience is amplified by the presence of his brothers, rendered as silhouettes in the foreground. These figures provide a sense of solidarity, while also evoking the precariousness of Black life.
The initial and primary context for this image is WARTIME magazine, a quarterly digital and print publication we produce at Black Men Build. WARTIME is explicitly a call to action, framing its political, cultural, and artistic vision as essential tools for organizing and transformation. Rest During Wartime composes the inside back cover of WARTIME’s Issue 6—an object within an object, its meaning initially framed by the magazine's radical agenda. Our magazine echoes a form posed by Tricontinental, a periodical founded by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OPSAAAL) and published in Havana, Cuba: Tricontinental included posters folded inside of almost every issue, with deep coverage and analysis of social movements worldwide.
As a commissioned piece for the magazine, Rest During Wartime functions as a free object: distributed to educate and mobilize, its worth measured in its capacity to inspire action. On the other hand, Rest During Wartime was also sold separately from the magazine as a limited-edition poster for fundraising purposes, and took on a different physical and economic identity. The separated poster’s slightly different colors, and the inherent grit of the screenprinting process used to make this new version, add a tactile, less polished quality that distinguishes it from its smoother digital production in the magazine. The poster form also allows Rest During Wartime to exist on walls and in spaces outside of the magazine, responding to and providing its own context away from WARTIME as a publication.
Rest During Wartime is deeply informed by a legacy of politically committed art, drawing visual and compositional inspiration from Aaron Douglas’s Into Bondage (1936) and the propaganda of Emory Douglas for The Black Panther Party (as the Black Pant
her Party’s Minister of Culture) (1970), as well as a poster produced in Tricontinental in 1968. Shorts was inspired not only by their messages of liberation but by their distinct visual languages; the silhouettes, and radiating coloring of Aaron Douglas; and the bold, accessible iconography of Emory Douglas. In Rest During Wartime, these artistic elements are inseparable from their political purpose.
Emory Douglas and Abreu Padrón Lázaro, Solidarity with the African American People and OSPAAAL, 1968; Emory Douglas, Our People's Army,1970; Emory Douglas, Revolution In Our Lifetime, 1970
The use of silhouette in shading the subjects of the illustrations, for instance, highlights the relationship between the individual and the collective—not allowing for the identification of an individual figure — silhouette is an open form that offers an opportunity for people to imagine themselves into the work, into history. The visuality of this work connects with viewers who may be more attuned to visual learning, and teaches revolution in a mode accessible to many more of us.
Together, all of the works I reference here exemplify what I call a Revolutionary Black Gaze. The Revolutionary Black Gaze, as evidenced in Shorts' work, can be defined by how it:
Rejects Commodified Suffering: It refuses to trade in Black pain as spectacle, offering instead a praxis of radical viewing/listening and dignified representation.
Centers Radical Traditions: It draws from and contributes to histories of Black internationalism and solidarity with global liberation struggles.
Employs Art as Education: It uses aesthetic form not for decoration, but for explicit political education and consciousness-raising.
Balances Struggle and Futurity: It acknowledges the reality of ongoing conflict and death while simultaneously insisting on and visualizing Black futurity.
In Black Looks (1992), bell hooks articulates the Black gaze as a resistant counter-look that interrogates and disrupts dominant visual regimes. Toni Morrison modeled this aesthetic refusal throughout her literary career, deliberately excluding the White gaze from her work. In a more contemporary frame, Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze (2021) describes how Black artists like Arthur Jafa and Deana Lawson create images that refuse legibility, privilege Black intimacy and interiority, resist the white colonial gaze, and deploy “haptic visuality”—images that are felt as much as they are seen. Rooted in these theorizations of the Black gaze, the Revolutionary Black Gaze extends these frameworks further.
Drawing from Sampada Aranke’s Death’s Futurity, I posit that a Revolutionary Black Gaze acknowledges the centrality of Black death in state violence while insisting on envisioning liberation beyond mourning. Aranke’s work examines how Black artists and activists wielded visual media—photographs, posters, films, and performances—to challenge anti-Black violence and envision liberation during the revolutionary 1960s and ’70s. Central to her analysis are figures like Emory Douglas and artists such as Benny Andrews and Betye Saar. Aranke contends that death functioned not merely as an end but as a generative force within Black Power movements, exploring how martyrdom, collective mourning, and the looming threat of state violence influenced Black radical thought and artistic expression. In her 2013 essay, “Fred Hampton’s Murder and the Coming Revolution” she says,
Opening up Hampton’s home as an exhibition, the Panthers curated and narrated the bloody scene as a document of antiblack violence. As the film visualizes, this act of curation presents quite a radical political articulation. Refusing to rely on the state’s narrative of Hampton’s murder, and preempting state repression of narratives to the contrary, the Panthers invited community members to come look for themselves. This kind of live-curatorial practice was further enhanced and archived when the Panthers invited The Film Group to document the exhibition.
Rest During Wartime, and other works composed within or toward a Revolutionary Black Gaze, embody a
crucial dialectic: they form the space where we mourn fallen comrades, a grief inextricably linked to collective struggle. This very grief, born from the madness of conflict, also fuels the spirit to fight on. By accepting this violent reality, our collective mourning becomes a source of healing and resilience in the protracted war waged against oppressed peoples worldwide. While not the only path, this shared experience of violence forges powerful bonds of solidarity—an essential strategy for overcoming a formidable and cruel enemy.
Courtney Baker’s notion of Humane Insight focuses our lens, pushing audiences to respond ethically and politically to Black suffering. Baker interrogates how the notion of humanity was articulated and recognized in often-referenced moments within the African American experience. Similar to Aranke, she traces how the visual display of violence has been used to galvanize action against racial injustice, suggesting that this position can serve as a model for taking action. Some examples include: Emmett Till's murder and funeral, the MOVE bombing of 1985, the murder of Michael Brown, the genocides in Palestine and Sudan. A Revolutionary Black Gaze argues that our looking and listening with art objects, similar to real life events, should ignite us to action rather than spectatorship, that we have a responsibility to look and do. Both Baker and WARTIME take us from the safety of the gaze toward building the capacity for human suffering, the first step required in movement towards action. Why else would artists like Benny Andrews and Faith Ringgold dedicate artwork in the name of George Jackson's assassination? Why would Dead Prez produce Let’s Get Free, if not in the hope that these works would transform their audiences?
A Revolutionary Black Gaze takes up fugitivity as well, whether through the outer-worldly sounds and visuals of Sun Ra, the speculative social realism of Octavia Butler's Earthseed, or the action-oriented power of Elizabeth Catlett's The Negro Woman series. As embodied by the Maroons of the past and present, fugitivity is more than an escape from the violence of the carceral state. It is a profound practice of sovereignty, freedom, and world-building. This vision is guided by the imaginations of visual artists, musicians, and writers whose work is fundamentally oriented toward building a future for oppressed people that isn’t escapist, but rather constructivist.
In this same spirit, Black Men Build’s WARTIME seeks to transform its readers: to shift their relationship with their community and themselves, to inspire the belief that they are a part of building a new world, and, most importantly, to compel them to act on it and not run from the terrors of the present. In league with Douglas’s and Short’s use of the silhouettes, WARTIME, and the Revolutionary Black Gaze writ large, explicitly want viewers to see themselves beyond representation, as possible co-conspirators.
Like his predecessors—Aaron Douglas with the Harlem Artists Guild, Emory Douglas with the Black Panther Party, and the artists of Tricontinental with OSPAAAL—Marshall Shorts, through his work with Black Men Build, operates at the intersection of art and political action through a commitment to radical organizations and institutions. Short’s work, and the framework of the Revolutionary Black Gaze, prompt a crucial investigation into how such art functions within and contributes to the Black Radical Tradition. It challenges the boundaries of art history and aligns with Black Studies as a critique of Western thought, knowledge and cultural production. This framework echoes what W.E.B. Du Bois made clear in The Criteria of Negro Art:
“All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (Du Bois, 1926).
Bibliography
Aranke, Sampada. “Fred Hampton’s Murder and the Coming Revolution.” ASAP/Journal (blog), October 31, 2013. https://asapjournal.com/fred-hamptons-murder-and-the-coming-revolution-sampada-aranke/.
Baker, Courtney. Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Bambara, Toni Cade. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Edited by Thabiti Lewis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Camt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2021.
Dead Prez. Let's Get Free. Loud Records, 2000. MP3.
Douglas, Aaron. Into Bondage. 1936. Oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 60 1/2 in. (153.2 x 153.8 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Douglas, Emory. Our People's Army. 1970. Screenprint. In The Black Panther newspaper.
Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–297.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Marshall, Kerry James. Black Painting. 2003. Acrylic and glitter on PVC panel, 111.8 × 121.9 cm. Art Institute of Chicago
Monet, Aja. Quoted in author’s text, 2023.
Morrison, Toni. Interview by Charlie Rose. The Charlie Rose Show. PBS, May 7, 1993.
Shorts, Marshall. Rest During Wartime. 2024. Screenprint. UprightPress.
Tricontinental. Havana: Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), 1966–1990.
WARTIME. Black Men Build. https://www.blackmenbuild.org/wartime.
Ekundayo Igeleke (he/him) was born to Nigerian and southern Baptist parents. He is a popular educator, writer, photographer, scholar, national strategist, and grassroots organizer with over ten years of experience in these areas. He currently is the Director of Education and Culture with Black Men Build, founder of Culture Dream Lab, and a PhD Candidate in Comparative Studies and Black Studies at The Ohio State University. He serves as a member of the Maroon Arts Group and The Party for Socialism and Liberation. When he is not in radical action, he spends time with his family and village, watches anime and basketball, practices yoga, enjoys a variety of community arts, and reads 3-4 books at a time.
