Bartenders and shrinks may get the credit for listening skills, but the stylists who cut your hair could write seasons of soaps with the secrets and intimacies they’ve gleaned.

Artist, educator, writer and arts activist Colette Gaiter created a project in 2016 that intervened with a series of informative art cards to improve awareness of domestic violence at beauty salons. Hundreds of African American women recorded their hair stories and participated in two art projects, enabling beauty entrepreneurs to use their salons in proactive ways.

While a professor of Africana Studies and Art & Design at the University of Delaware, Gaiter organized a short video festival in nearby Wilmington which, while it “has been vital, decimated, and rejuvenated over its history… the city’s violent racial past still resonates,” according to her website. “With a 60 percent black population and a history of slavery, segregation, and riots, specific attention must be paid to issues of diversity, equal economic opportunity, and social justice.”

Installation view of Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy, 2025, Courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

Now, Gaiter is carrying on as curator of “Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy” on view through March 15 at Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum in Glassboro.

The exhibition’s timeline of the Black Panther Party’s history begins with the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619. “Though America did not even exist yet, their arrival marked its foundation, the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built,” according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The timeline makes note of how one-third of the Declaration of Independence signers were enslavers; and while The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared that Union victory would end slavery, it took another century before the enactment of Civil Rights Act, the ending of Jim Crow laws and, in 1965, the Voting Rights Law.

These acts theoretically ended legal discrimination, but its practice was still the norm. In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, to combat police brutality and racial inequality – its motto was “Each one teach one.”  The Party’s community programs provided free breakfast meals for children, health clinics, free groceries, schools, and arts initiatives.

Installation view of Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy, 2025, Courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

In 1967 it launched the Black Panther newspaper as a crucial tool for communicating political messages, organizing programs, and providing news relevant to Black communities, “progressives of all races, and worldwide liberation movements.”

The four artists in the exhibition – Gayle Asali Dickson, Emory Douglas, Malik Edwards and Akinsanya Kambon – “were teenagers and young adults when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation and discrimination in the United States,” according to exhibition materials. “They grew up in the Jim Crow era, restricted by laws and practices that affected every aspect of their lives and severely limited opportunities to pursue their dreams. Through talent, perseverance, and serendipity, they became and remain artists.”

Now in their 70s and 80s, these artists are, well, carrying on. The common denominator of their careers were the Party and its newspaper where, in the 1970s, their “illustrations and cartoons show Black people in ways that had never been seen in mainstream media or even the Black press.”

The artists, says Gaiter, “participated in a radical justice experiment that resonates today over half a century later… Their work helped make lasting changes in the world. Carrying on the BPP’s teachings, all four artists still work with communities, telling visual stories that sustain a steady movement toward liberation for everyone.”

Installation view of works by Emory Douglas, Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy, 2025, Courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

Drawings, paintings, clay sculptures, graphic design, digital prints, and AI-generated images fill the gallery. Two embroidered tapestries sewn by Zapatista women in Chiapas, Mexico, are an example of Emory Douglas’s international collaborative projects.

Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she attended a mostly white high school, Gaiter first encountered the Black Panther newspaper when her sister brought it home from Howard University. “I was in awe of the graphics and illustrations and inspired by the writing. The paper connected me to Black people living in oppressed conditions across the country and around the world. I was inspired by the Party's insistence on liberation for all people.”

Emory Douglas was named Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until 1982. His work became the signature style of The Black Panther newspaper, and his work went on to have solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including the New Museum in New York and Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. After the Black Panther Party era, he became designer and illustrator for the San Francisco Sun Reporter.

“The battle cry ‘Culture Is A Weapon’ is a powerful tool in all of its expressions and forms,” says Douglas. “It has the power to transform the colonization of the imagination… The goal should be to make the message clear so that even a child can understand it.”

Gaiter learned about Douglas when a colleague suggested designers and illustrators of color to show her class. “I connected with him on a visit to San Francisco in 2004, and we have been in touch ever since. I knew that his work was politically important as well as aesthetically powerful and I wanted people to know about it.” She has written about Douglas many times, and is presently at work on a book about him.

“He was a commercially trained artist/designer/illustrator which showed in his work. The commercial disciplines of art and design, illustration, graphic design, and advertising have excluded Black people much more thoroughly than fine art disciplines. Since his re-introduction after a monograph of his work ‘Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas’ (to which Gaiter was a major contributor) he became internationally known and appreciated.”

Douglas was a mentor to all the artists who worked with the Party, says Gaiter.

Asali, as Gayle Asali Dickson was then known, was the only woman artist on The Black Panther newspaper between 1972 and 1974. Then, and now, her subjects were primarily women and children.

Installation view of Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy, 2025, Courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

“I believe that as an artist, I am called to help make sure that our African American stories, and therefore America’s stories, are not forgotten,” Asali writes. She calls some of her paintings “Spirits Revealed” because the painting reveals itself to her without a plan. One such painting occurred in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

“The Spirit reminds us that stories like this have a long history in America,” Asali says. “This story was heard and witnessed around the world because a brave young girl captured it in a cell phone video. The painting of a woman confronting dangerous spirits revealed itself to me as I randomly applied paint to paper.”

Her portraits are part of a protest series illuminating people who fight for justice, similar to the work she did for the Black Panther Party. “Paintings like the ones of Queen Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Queen Ella Baker are reminders that Black history is America’s history. Their voices and lives are empowering and should not be forgotten. Queen Ida was an investigative journalist and one of the early anti-lynching crusaders in America. Queen Ella was a remarkable organizer and strategist during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. A portrait of Sandra Bland represents people who were victims of the U.S. justice system.”

Malik Edwards served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and, upon his return, was assigned to work as an illustrator for the U.S. Marine Corps’ technical manuals,  incorporating people with distinguishably Black features in his designs.

These artists “drew authentic Black people, meaning they had dark skin, Black noses, hair, and other features,” says Gaiter. “They sometimes wore tattered clothing and lived in substandard conditions. Plaster was falling off the walls, and mice and other vermin were prominent. The goal of these drawings was to show the reality of Black life for too many Americans. People were able to see themselves and their families and relatives in the paper's illustrations.”

In 1970, after leaving the USMC, Edwards moved to Northern California and trained as an apprentice for Douglas. There he learned the technical details of drawing, printing, and layout. He met and worked alongside Asali who also influenced his art. As the head of the Black Panther Party’s Washington, D.C. regional branch, he regularly designed posters, flyers, and magazines for pro-Black events and anti-drug campaigns.

Installation view of Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy, 2025, Courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

He later learned to use digital media, which is now an integral part of his practice. “Recently, I have been playing with AI prompts to create images of Black people who are underrepresented in AI,” Edwards says. He has produced two books of his art that include the story of his struggles with post-war PTSD and his spiritual journey.

“When I use the word ‘divine’ I am not referring to religion,” he says. “I mean humans at our highest ideal. I am open to the idea of the innate wisdom of mind, thought, and consciousness.”

Having worked in clay for almost four decades, Akinsanya Kambon creates sculptures in the form of vessels, figures, and wall plaques. These works are kiln-fired in African ceremony, using a Western-style raku technique mastered over decades. These ceramics visualize narratives of the Black diaspora and are tools for spiritual and educational instruction.

From 1966 to 1968, Kambon served in Vietnam with the USMC as a combat illustrator and infantryman, where he was awarded several Purple Hearts for his bravery. Upon his return, he joined the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party. As Lieutenant of Culture, he worked on the layout and illustrations for the party’s newspaper.

He has long been an advocate for art and education, working as a professor of art at the California State University, Long Beach, for 26 years, as well as running gratis youth art programs devoted to African, Indigenous, and Latino culture out of his Long Beach studio.

“I was born into a legacy of revolution and rebellion, a calling to fight for change that is central to my work,” says Kambon. “Much of my art speaks to the struggles of oppressed people fighting for liberation. My lineage itself bears this history—my great great-grandfather was among those who fought in the 1811 German Coast Rebellion, a powerful uprising of enslaved people in Louisiana. He was executed alongside one of his sons, and this legacy lives within me, driving my commitment to resist injustice. My art is an expression of that resistance.

“To remain silent or complicit is to betray those who came before us,” Kambon continues. “Our purpose is to make the world better for those who come after us, honoring the sacrifices made by generations before.”

While internal divisions and FBI pressure led to the decline of the BPP by the 1970s and it officially disbanded in 1982, its legacy continues through ongoing community activism. Party members gather every five years for a reunion, and the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party will be held in October 2026.

And yet the battle is far from over. As for the dismantling of DEI initiatives, “Black Panthers are probably the least surprised group of people in the country,” says Gaiter. “For decades, they have been confronting the U.S.'s lack of commitment to its people, especially Black people and other people of color, and deference to self-dealing wealthy people, white supremacists, international autocrats, and corporations. What is happening now is more overt than ever, and they are well prepared.”

As an artist, how is Gaiter responding? “By doing what I have always tried to do as an artist, writer, and educator--tell the truth.”

The Rowan Art Gallery is located at 301 High Street West in Glassboro, New Jersey.