29 May - 10 August 2025
For the first time in London, Shames’ powerful civil rights images of Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Maya Angelou and Angela Davis, amongst others, will be on view at Amar Gallery.
At a time when racism is on the rise, Amar Gallery hopes this exhibition serves as a reminder that equality has been a struggle for millions often suppressed due to race, gender, or sexuality. Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, who co-authored a book with Shames, said of the tribulations the Black Panthers faced: “They came down on us because we had grassroots, real people’s revolution, complete with the program, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.” The people’s revolution, programmes and working coalitions were documented by Shames for years, protecting the legacy, history and spirit of the equal rights movement.
In 1966, as the largely nonviolent Civil Rights movement swept through America, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the legendary Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The party burst onto the scene with a bold vision for social change and the empowerment of African Americans. During the height of the movement, from 1967 to 1973, photographer Stephen Shames, who was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, had unprecedented access to the organization.
Shames captured not only its public face—street demonstrations, protests and militant armed posturing—but also, life behind the scenes, from private Party meetings to Bobby Seale at work on his Oakland mayoral campaign.
Stephen Shames’ images are in the permanent collections of over 40 international museums and collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; International Center of Photography, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; University of California's Bancroft Library, Berkeley; San Jose Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.
About Amar Gallery:
Amar Gallery was opened in Islington, London January 2017 to show world-class post-war and contemporary art. Amar Gallery is managed by director Amar Singh who started dealing art in 2010. He is a patron of the Tate & India’s anti-trafficking organisation Shakti Vahini and India’s organisation We Power which provides dignified employment opportunities for women survivors of human trafficking. The gallery also runs a programme of donating artworks by artists of colour, women and LGBT+ to museums worldwide: https://www.amargallery.com/donations - over $4 million worth of art by such overlooked artists has been donated to date - www.amargallery.com
