A Legacy as Deep as the Ocean
By Lisbet Tellefsen
Two years ago, historian Amy Sueyoshi and I co-curated a special exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society Museum called “Angela Davis: OUTspoken,” documenting the journey of Black lesbian activist, scholar, political prisoner and public intellectual Angela Davis. A major success in 2018, the exhibition is being released as an online exhibition on the society’s website on August 10.
A Moral Center
Angela Davis, photograph by Allen Zak, Berkeley Graphic Arts, 1970; collection of Lisbet Tellefsen, used with permission.
At a moment when the concept of intersectionality is finally beginning to penetrate the mainstream, Angela Davis’s life is more relevant than ever. Davis was involved with Communist Party USA and the Black Power movement, and she’s still pushing the envelope around LGBTQ issues internationally, including places where it is not politically welcome. She is among the globe’s foremost philosophers on freedom and has always held the moral center. After a half-century, she has maintained the ability to communicate with remarkable clarity, even while engaging with complex issues of history and theory.
Amy and I focused the exhibition around the most graphically impactful political posters of Davis from my personal archives. I came to build this collection through my longtime love of graphic poster design — the intersection of graphics, propaganda, politics and messaging remain fascinating to me. I collected posters as a child, and growing up in Berkeley, political graphics were ubiquitous. In fact, one of my earliest jobs in high school was at The Print Mint, which was “ground zero” for psychedelic posters and early alternative comics. It was there that I learned to run a printing press, and I went on to run a print shop for the next 30 years.
Repurposing Images
Davis herself came to public prominence in the heyday of early reproductive graphics: after a full-page photograph of her appeared in Life magazine, artists around the world from Spain to the Soviet Union borrowed that image and repurposed it in different ways. Posters are very interesting media because while they are mass-produced, they still contain incredible original artwork. So when it came time to select posters for this exhibition, I chose those I felt were most impactful and represented significant ideas or events.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, unfortunately scuttled plans for the largest exhibition of my career, which was scheduled to open at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University this year, and in 2021 would have gone to the Oakland Museum of California. In fact, these institutions scouted material that I first displayed at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. So it’s gratifying that “OUTspoken” will now get a new lease on life. Davis’s five decades of activism and the legions of scholars she has mentored add up to a legacy as deep as the ocean. She’s a voice that we need to center right now.
Lisbet Tellefesen has been an archivist, collector and event producer in the Bay Area for more than three decades.