Ilka Hartmann
bill·board
|ˈbilbôrd | noun
A large outdoor board for displaying advertisements: the display of suggestive advertisements on billboards | [as modifier]: a billboard advertising campaign.
Contemporary public billboards were first introduced during the 1889 Paris Exposition. They have since been used as commercial media tools to advertise everything from commercial products to military service ads. Billboards though have also been used as a tool to illuminate social-political causes. The Independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization (The Black Panther Party) was a Black political party founded in 1965, Lowndes County Alabama. The LCFO assisted in registering Blacks to vote by designing and painting their own public billboards. This became a highly effective visual political tool that captured the community’s imagination. Other groups and individuals have likewise utilized billboards as a tool for social change. Contemporary artists like Yoko Ono, James Rosenquist, Feminist organizations like the Guerrilla Girls, AID's activist/artist, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and the community founded, Bass Collective to name a few.
The Greenwood Art Project reached out to Ilka Hartmann, an activist and nationally established photographer known for documenting the 2-year occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-1971) by Native American tribes, Mayday: Bloody Thursday Berkley Riot, 1969, Sandinista led a revolution in Nicaragua 1979 among others.
Ilka Hartmann contributed two photographs for the Greenwood Art Project billboard project. The photographs originate from the Black Panther Party-led demonstration to free Dr. Huey P. Newton, at the Alameda County courthouse, San Francisco, CA. The photos depict Black Panther members, teenagers, and children supporting the struggle to free Newton and other political prisoners at the time.
Greenwood Art Project saw the parallels and necessity to align symbolic images of struggle and empowerment with the 1921 - 2021 Greenwood Centennial. As a way of shaping and forming the future by reflecting on past representations of self-determination.
— william cordova
