![\"Dana](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/picDanaChandlerFredHamptonsDoor2_1975_SoulOfANationBrooklynMuseum180912_1899w.jpg\")
<\/a>Chandler\u2019s second version of that painting \u201cFred Hampton\u2019s Door 2\u201d from 1975 stands at the heart of \u201cSoul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,\u201d a landmark survey exhibition organized by the Tate Modern and on view at New York\u2019s Brooklyn Museum through Feb. 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n Chandler \u201csort of fully took it upon himself, in what he saw as a deliberately unsubtle way, to make images of protest that directly related to the events of the Black Power struggle,\u201d says Mark Godfrey, one of Tate curators who organized \u201cSoul of a Nation.\u201d \u201cHis work was the most overt, the most directly political.\u201d<\/p>\n In Chandler\u2019s second version of \u201cFred Hampton\u2019s Door,\u201d he used an actual wooden door that he stood up on a black base and painted vivid red and green\u2014the colors of the Pan-African flag. The door\u2014particularly the knob and lock\u2014appear shattered by bullets. And it\u2019s all splattered with red paint, like blood. It exudes a visceral sense of violence.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very compelling piece. It\u2019s a very poignant meditation on the killing of a young activist,\u201d Godfrey says. \u201cThe door is shot through so in some way the door stands for the body. \u2026 It\u2019s not a subtle work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n Update:<\/strong> On April 7, 2021, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts announced “the acquisition of a major work by Dana Chandler, Jr. (born 1941). ‘Fred Hampton\u2019s Door 2’ (1974) serves as a statement against police who killed 21-year-old Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, in Chicago. The piece, pierced with bullet holes and painted in vivid green and red\u2014colors referencing the Pan-African flag\u2014memorializes Hampton and associates his murder with the broader suppression of Black liberation movements globally.”<\/em><\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Black Revolutionary Change<\/strong><\/p>\n Dana Chandler Jr. was at the African American artistic vanguard as the Civil Rights movement shifted to Black Power.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack Power was coming out of an urgency, out of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965,\u201d says Ashley James, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, who oversaw the presentation of \u201cSoul of a Nation\u201d there. It was coming out of the shooting of James Meredith, the first black man to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962, during the second day of his \u201cMarch Against Fear\u201d from Memphis to Jackson in June 1966. It was coming out of frustration over the Voting Rights Act being passed in 1965, but Black folks still prevented from voting. \u201cThere was a sense of a real disenchantment with nonviolence and legal means of achieving equality.\u201d<\/p>\n The Black Power movement sparked a new political sensibility and a growth of activism among Black artists. Black artists also grew increasingly and vocally concerned about access to the art world and curatorial authority, notes Edmund Barry Gaither, longtime director of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood, who contributed an essay to the \u201cSoul of a Nation\u201d catalog.<\/p>\n \u201cDana comes into his own in a moment when artists are being called upon, if you\u2019re plugged into the vibe, to take a role in the social struggle,\u201d Gaither says. \u201cDana participates in this new and stronger direction in which visual artists are being called to engage in art that is involved in Black revolutionary change.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler was born April 7, 1941, and spent his early years in Lynn, Massachusetts, before moving to Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood when he was 5 years old. In his early 20s, he was president of Boston Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and worked against segregation of Boston public schools. Before heading off to the 1963 March on Washington, he told The Boston Globe: \u201cI feel this (equal rights) is something my ancestors bungled and what we must correct now. I want to do something so when my children grow up it will all be a bad dream.\u201d<\/p>\n Particularly galvanizing for Chandler was a June 1967 sit-in staged by Mothers for Adequate Welfare at Boston\u2019s Grove Hall Welfare Department Office on Blue Hill Avenue. \u201cThey charged that their checks were cut off without notification or investigation, that social workers were hostile to them and that police \u2018pushed them around\u2019 at the welfare offices,\u201d The Boston Globe reported.<\/p>\n Protests and uprisings across the United States \u201cwere born out of anger and frustration with the sum of conditions\u2014economic, political, social, across the board\u2014that had been growing in intensity since the Second World War,\u201d Gaither says. \u201cThe entire landscape was shifting. It\u2019s a shift in which Black people, especially young Black people feel emboldened and feel in fact that they have the obligation to press forward.\u201d<\/p>\n The Grove Hall protest began on a Thursday, with the women demanding to talk with city Welfare Director Daniel J. Cronin. He didn\u2019t appear until Friday evening, when about 50 women, several with small children, still occupied the office and a crowd of a few hundred people had gathered on the street. Boston Police tried to force the women out. \u201cA woman inside screamed,\u201d the Globe reported. \u201cThe window in a door shattered. The crowed surged forward. Physical contact was made. A sidewalk brick whipped across the street.\u201d<\/p>\n The following day, the Globe headline read: \u201cSit-In Escalates into Riot: 500 in Roxbury Melee; 45 Hurt, 30 Held, Shots Fired.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler says, \u201cThey had that huge police riot at Grove Hall at the welfare office they had at the time. The welfare mothers had the audacity to picket the welfare office. \u2026 The police rioted all over the people in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n Roxbury Rebellion <\/strong><\/p>\n Chandler graduated from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston the same month as the Grove Hall sit-in.<\/p>\n \u201cI did a couple, two or three paintings in response to that,\u201d Chandler says. He portrayed White police beating fleeing Black women in paintings with titles like \u201cGrove Hall Love-In\u201d and \u201cRoxbury Rebellion.\u201d \u201cThat really was the codifying event that happened that caused me to become what White folks termed a \u2018revolutionary artist.\u2019 \u2026 Most of these names were attached to Black movements by White folks.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got an awful lot to say about what is happening to my people in this country and I\u2019m going to say it,\u201d Chandler told the Globe in January 1968, when he had an exhibition at a Lexington public library. \u201cI\u2019m trying to get across to the black community that art can say something, dammit, and to them. I want my art to be for them and for the few whites, artists maybe, who can understand it and love it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGrove Hall Love-In\u201d was one seven Chandler\u2019s paintings vandalized in the Lexington exhibition in February 1968. Someone splashed white paint across the artworks. \u201cThe police had me take a lie detector test to make sure I didn\u2019t do it,\u201d Chandler says.<\/p>\n \u201cI was upset,\u201d Chandler told the Globe in 1968, \u201cbut I wasn\u2019t surprised. I expected that my paintings would arouse some kind of reaction in the white community.\u201d<\/p>\n The following month, his 8-foot oil portrait of Stokely Carmichael was found \u201cripped to pieces by vandals\u201d at Boston Technical High School, the Globe reported.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, during the summer of 1967, African American artists pained a 60-foot-wide mural on the side of a run-down tavern on Chicago\u2019s South Side. It was a work of affirmation, highlighting African American heroes. They called it the \u201cWall of Respect\u201d<\/a> and the mural would inspire hundreds of Black Power murals all across the United States. Among the artists it inspired was Chandler. \u201cWe wanted to do some \u2018Walls of Respect\u2019 in the black community like the one that was done in Chicago,\u201d Chandler said in 1974 to the authors of the 1977 book \u201cTowards a People\u2019s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler, Gary Rickson and Sharon Dunn were among the artists who began painting Black Power murals in Boston. \u201cThere is no black art in the Museum of Fine Arts,\u2019 Chandler told the Globe in July 1968, \u201cso we are going to utilize the fa\u00e7ade of buildings in our community for our museum.\u201d Chandler continued, \u201cBlack art is not a decoration. It\u2019s a revolutionary force.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler painted a mural depicting Malcolm X. He painted a mural urging people that “Knowledge Is Power\/ Stay in School.” He painted a \u201cFreedom and Self Defense” mural, which showed \u201cStokely Carmichael shining rays of knowledge into the body of a slave who\u2019s trying to rise up and free himself,\u201d Chandler recalls. \u201cRap Brown had a Molotov cocktail in this hand. That\u2019s probably why the piece got bottles of white paint thrown on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler repeatedly challenged the de facto White-artists-only segregation of Boston area museums\u2014calling on Brandeis University\u2019s Rose Art Museum, Boston\u2019s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts to feature Black artists. \u201cThe Museum of Fine Arts was right across the street from the Black community and didn\u2019t show Black art until the 1970s,\u201d Chandler says.<\/p>\n In January 1970, Chandler arrived at Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts with a letter addressed to museum director Perry T. Rathbone and the board of directors: \u201cA Proposal to Eradicate Institutional Racism at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.\u201d<\/p>\n Elma Lewis, founder of Boston\u2019s National Center of Afro-American Artists, had been carrying on negotiations with MFA leaders for as many as five years to help launch an African American museum here. She\u2019d got the museum to help support the hiring in 1969 of Edmund Barry Gaither as an African American curator and consultant to the Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the National Center.<\/p>\n These twin pressures from Lewis and Chandler led the Museum of Fine Arts to put together the exhibit \u201cAfro-American Artists: New York and Boston\u201d at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in spring 1970. Along with New York artists Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis and Alvin Loving, it featured Boston artists Chandler, Rickson, Ellen Banks, Calvin Burnett, Jerry Pinkey, John Wilson and Richard Yard.<\/p>\n Chandler\u2019s career was on the ascent, but then his studio in Boston\u2019s South End was ransacked in 1973. \u201cFirst they broke in, stole everything they could possibly steal. Then they turned the water on to flood the basement. Then they burned the building down,\u201d Chandler says.<\/p>\n Northeastern University in Boston came to his aid by bringing him in to be an artist-in-residence at the school\u2019s new African American Studies program in return for teaching a course at the school.<\/p>\n Chandler soon convinced Northeastern to give him larger space, in an old factory at 11 Leon St. in Roxbury that the school owned. He moved in during 1974 and turned it into a mammoth studio (around 32,000 square feet) and event space, hosting parties for the MFA and a conference of African American artists. The space was so large that in November 1978, Chandler and Northeastern opened the space up to other black artists as part of the launch of the African American Master Artists In Residence Program<\/a>. Ten large studios were offered \u201cto provide a living focus for the international third world and world community around the diverse dynamics of African-American aesthetics,\u201d organizers said at the time.<\/p>\n The initial roster of artists (not all of them occupied studios at Northeastern, as some preferred to keep the studios they already had) included Ellen Banks, Calvin Burnett, Dana Chandler, Milton (Johnson) Derr, Tyrone Geter, Arnold Hurley, Reggie Jackson, Stanley Pickney, James Reed, Rudolph Robinson, Barbara Ward, John Wilson, and Theresa Young.<\/p>\n It was a landmark project in its recognition of black artists, in the amount of space offered, in the length of the residencies (three years to start, but many allowed to stay much longer; some current resident artists have been there decades), and it was \u201crent-free\u201d (which continues to this day, artists say). \u201cThus enabling the artists to produce works at a level of intensity none has ever been able to attain,\u201d organizers wrote in the late 1970s. (Since late June, Northeastern leaders have been telling the program to vacate its current studios at 76 Atherton St. \u201cbecause of hazardous conditions.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cDana was certainly a catalytic personality in the Black art scene,\u201d Gaither says. \u201cHe stood at the head of an activist element of the artist community, especially from the late \u201860s into the \u201880s. \u2026 He was never one to mince his words or retreat from confrontation. In fact, I think he liked that much more than others in the art community. So he was always making a way, making a space that others could consolidate. I think he also thought a lot about artists as a community (that isn\u2019t to suggest he hasn\u2019t always had a great affection for himself, he has a good ego) that is expressed more than anything else in how he forged AAMARP. He could have shaped that only as a personal opportunity. \u2026 But he chose to make that a bigger thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Fred Hampton\u2019s Door<\/strong><\/p>\n Chandler exhibited his first version of \u201cFred Hampton\u2019s Door\u201d in a one-person show at Galerie Amadeus on Boston\u2019s Newbury Street in October 1970. The exhibition also included paintings about junkies overdosing on drugs and the Vietnam War\u2019s affect on people of color. In the gallery\u2019s window was Chandler\u2019s painting of President Richard Nixon holding a puppet resembling Vice President Spiro Agnew. Adolph Hitler stood behind them. The background was an American flag with the stars replaced with a swastika. \u201cI\u2019m peaceful people, but this way is the way it\u2019s got to be because you other people are foolish,\u201d Chandler told the Bay State Banner then.<\/p>\n \u201cHe would see something in the news one day and go into his studio the next and making a painting of it,\u201d Tate curator Mark Godfrey says. \u201c\u2026He was living in the present and his works were being made as interventions in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cblistering oil of Panther leader \u2018Fred Hampton\u2019s Door,\u2019 riddled with bullet holes\u201d (in the Globe\u2019s words) was exhibited again at National Center of Afro American Artists in spring 1971. But Chandler says it \u201cwas stolen from the 1974 Spokane, Washington, World\u2019s Fair,\u201d called Expo \u201974.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the show, when the work was supposed to be sent back, my work wasn\u2019t sent back,\u201d Chandler says. \u201cI contacted them. They acted mystified. I don\u2019t know if it was stolen in transit or stolen off the wall. \u2026 I\u2019ve had more people steal my work than buy my work.\u201d<\/p>\n Chandler decided to paint a new version of Fred Hampton\u2019s door using an actual door that he found abandoned in an empty lot. The curators of \u201cSoul of the Nation\u201d say he \u201csubjected [the door] to splintering and damage from bullets.\u201d Chandler is coy about whether he actually shot the door: \u201cI\u2019ll never tell. \u2026. Just say the holes magically appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRather than showing his [Hampton\u2019s] dead body, what I did is show a portion of a door with bullet holes in it,\u201d Chandler says of his original version of the painting. \u201cI\u2019m aware as an artist who is a student of art history, sometimes you create symbols of things as opposed to imagery that speaks realistically to things. And these officers had the audacity to blow the door open. An image of his body would be one of hundreds, of thousands of images of dead Black bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople find it very disturbing to stand in front of that door,\u201d Chandler says of his second version. \u201cIt makes Fred Hampton\u2019s death real. I would say it\u2019s one of the more important iconographic paintings in African American history.\u201d<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n The April 6, 1970, issue of Time magazine arrived with a portrait of Jessie Jackson on the cover painted by Jacob Lawrence and the headline \u201cBlack America 1970.\u201d Inside was an article about Black American artists\u2014Melvin Edwards, Richard Hunt, David Hammons, Sam Gilliam and, most prominently, \u201cBoston\u2019s Dana Chandler Jr., a product of the tough […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[408,265,74,496,37,485,207,162],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10084"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19303,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084\/revisions\/19303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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