Zapantera Negra: Artists Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow on artistic exchanges between Black Panther Party and Zapatista Communities

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Join us for a virtual conversation with artists Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow about Zapantera Negra, a series of artistic exchanges between Emory Douglas of the Black Panther Party and autonomous Indigenous and Zapatista communities. Sharing artworks made collaboratively by members of both movements, and engaging in discussion with volunteers at Interference Archive, Caleb and Mia will reflect on artmaking as a form of resistance and solidarity, the deeply transformative quality of images, and why we archive and learn from these visual materials of movements for self-determination.

Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow are co-founders of EDELO, an experimental art space and international residency that was founded in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico in 2009. EDELO was established as a space for artist and community projects, dialogues, and exhibitions that explore the ways in which art can be a tool for imagining alternatives to harmful and violent systems.

In 2012, Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, was invited to participate in a residency at EDELO to meet with autonomous Indigenous and Zapatista communities based in Chiapas, Mexico. This was followed by a series of return trips that he made to the area from 2012 to 2016. Douglas collaborated with Zapatista women embroidery collectives, with Zapatista farmers and painters, and with local artists, activists, and musicians. Through these exchanges, a unique celebratory and revolutionary visual language developed. 

Caleb and Mia will share artworks that were the result of these encounters and talk about Zapatismo in relation to the Black Power Movement. They will also discuss the impact of these movements in the present day. 

This program celebrates the publication of a new, updated, and expanded edition of Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas, a book published by Common Notions that celebrates and documents the collaborations (first published in 2017, republished in April 2022).

This program is presented as part of the exhibition “Silencio, Fuego, Palabra, Vida: Zapatista Graphics from the Archivo Itinerante de Gráfic​​a Zapatista and Interference Archive,” on view at Interference Archive from March 19 to April 30, 2022. 

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Speaker Bios

Mia Eve Rollow, a Chicago native, is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates nomadic, globally-engaged collectives of artistic practice, centering her work outside of the gallery construct and within the communities where she lives and works, in site-specific places of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. She received her BFA from the University of Maryland and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After receiving her graduate degree in 2009, she moved to Chiapas, Mexico where she co-founded EDELO, an ongoing global and collaborative project in which she remains co-director. In addition to EDELO, Mia has been one of the lead artists in other notable collaborations such as Zapantera Negra and Embassy of the Refugee. She has spoken about her work at the Creative Time Summit, The Queens Museum, and various academic and grassroots venues across the United States and Mexico. Her projects have been featured in The Guardian newspaper and other publications and podcasts. In 2021, the State of Maryland awarded her the Independent Artist Award. 

Her work strives to facilitate the expressions of communities through distributed authorship demanding transdisciplinary creative forms in sculpture, performance, community-based public intervention, and psychomagic through workshops that capture life stories and develop personalized symbols of both physical and metaphysical mobility.

The work focuses on intersectionality as a nucleus for engagement, tying together notions of ableism and white supremacy, human displacement, generational traumas, land and human rights, child labor and femicide, autonomy and self- determination.  

Caleb Duarte Piñon lives and works between the San Francisco Bay Area and San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. He studied at Fresno City College and is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was appointed as Oakland Arts Commissioner by then Mayor Jerry Brown in 2006. He has exhibited work at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Jack Fisher Gallery in San Francisco, Gallery 727 Los Angeles, the California Museum of Art in Oakland, the Fresno Art Museum, and many others. He has given talks in such places as the De Young Museum, SF, the Mexican Museum, SF, the University of the Dirt, Chiapas, the University of Social Science in Tuxla MX, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the 2012 Creative Time Summit in New York. He has created public works and community performances at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, in Santiago de Cuba, Chile, at El Pital, Honduras, in Mexico City, and throughout the US. His work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Art Ltd, The San Francisco Chronicle, and SPARK public television. Duarte is co-founder and director of EDELO (Where the United Nations Used to Be), a house of art in movement and an intercommunal artist residency of diverse practices. Situated in Chiapas, Mexico, the space invites participants with diverse practices to live and create. 

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This event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.