WATTS TOWERS ARTS CENTER CAMPUS

Politics, Race and Cartoons

David G. Brown

Curated by Rosie Lee Hooks

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Experience visual forms of satire, political cartooning, underscoring its historical use as anti-racist dissent and introspective critique. Taking controversial topics in all of their complexity, humor, and provocation, while
raising important questions about the social power of art.
David Brown keeps our storytelling traditions alive through visual satire. Sometimes it feels like our people have no memory. Each generation lives as if no one has lived before it. But do we blame ourselves for leaving them ignorant of what we encountered in life and what we felt about it?
 

Through storytelling we can pass down our history, racial and political wisdom. The experience of racism is an exile in itself. As we experience David’s living body of connected work, his quality of stilled laughter is mild and divisive at the same time, displaying the corrupt ways of racism and injustice throughout the world. The laughter he shares with us is illuminating, healing and promotes the best in us. His cartoons are uproarious but deadly serious visual stories.
 

With each stroke of his pen, he puts in hints of family, warmth, tolerance, and resiliency. As laughter is a language native to the soul. In this political atmosphere, we must hold onto the truth as we experience a coup d’etat in America and the dismantling of democracy as we know it. To American Black newspapers of the 1930’s and 1940’s “Ollie” Harrington was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons. He emerged as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and created Bootsie, the
popular cartoon figure that became a fixture in Black newspapers. Langston Hughes praised Harrington as America’s greatest Black
cartoonist.

Oliver Wendell Harrington single-handedly made the restaurant “Cafe Le Tournon” famous throughout the world. It was a gathering place for
expatriates such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, William Gardener Smith, and a young James Baldwin.

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-Rosie Lee Hooks

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