The Capture of Angela

Author
Nina Zurier

Decades

1970s 1980s

Activism Black Panthers Feminism
Racial Justice

On October 13, 1970, Angela Davis was arrested at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in midtown Manhattan. This photograph by Carrie Mae Weems is a reconstruction of that historic moment. Anthony Torres—in a review of the 2009 exhibition at San Francisco’s Gallery Paule Anglim that included this work—suggested that the series, Constructing History, “can be said to function in opposition to ‘official’ histories that have created distorted records that have written certain people and stories out of existence. By constructing and positing an alternate historical narrative aimed at subverting dominant ideological photographic conventions through a re-telling of American history via the use and subterfuge of the history of photography, Constructing History insists that we re-envision images perpetuated through the popular media, in order to implicate and compel viewers to examine ‘common sense’ modes of representation and their own cultural biases.”

—Anthony Torres, “Carrie Mae Weems @ Gallery Paule Anglim,” Whitehot Magazine (February 2009), https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/mae-weems-gallery-paule-anglim/1738

Carrie Mae Weems exhibition, And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People, was presented in SFAI’s Walter & McBean Gallery, April 2–May 2, 1992.

Angela Davis and Hilton Braithwaite at an opening at SFAI. Davis and Braithwaite were married from 1980 to 1983. Braithwaite was a student at SFAI in the photography department and graduated with an MFA in 1974. Photo: Stanley Greene.

Angela Davis and Mia Lor Houlberg, seminar class in McMillan Room at SFAI, 1980s. Photo: Michelle Hirschhorn-Smith.

Angela Davis’s eighteenth-month incarceration, which ultimately resulted in an acquittal, set off the nationwide “Free Angela Davis” movement among activists and artists. Following her 1972 trial where a jury cleared her of all charges, Davis remained a leading figure in social justice movements across the globe. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison–industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Art and Politics: An interview with Angela Davis by Dan Augustine, from The Toot, January 1981.

Davis began teaching at SFAI in 1976, and her courses included Art and Politics of the Black Experience, as well as classes in feminism, aesthetics, philosophy, and non-Western art history. In 1991 she was hired at UC Santa Cruz and is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments. In 2019 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

NZ