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"Blax" at Stax: Traveling exhibit displays 50 collectible posters of the dynaminte blaxploitation films

By John Beifuss
beifuss@commercialappeal.com

'Blax' at Stax
Traveling exhibit displays 50 collectible posters of dynamite blaxploitation films
 
"She's brown sugar and spice/ But if you don't treat her nice/ She'll put you on ice!" warns the poster for Pam Grier's 1974 vehicle of inner-city vengeance, "Foxy Brown." ("Don't mess aroun' -- with Foxy Brown!")

"She's a One Mama Massacre Squad!" promises the poster for "TNT Jackson" (1975), which introduced Playboy Playmate Jeanne Bell as a kung fu killer-hunter in Hong Kong.

"Six times tougher than 'Shaft'! Six times rougher than 'Superfly'! See the biggest, baddest and best waste 158 motorcycle dudes!" Who could resist such a specific boast, as found on the poster for "The Black Six" (1974)?

Whatever the merits of the films they advertised, the posters created during the 1970s era of so-called "blaxploitation" cinema are incredible: Garish action paintings of bikinied Amazons, fur-coated pimps and guns-a-blazing cops, all taking aim at that devil of oppression known as the Man.

Now, 50 of these collector's items -- from "Coffy" to "Dolemite" to our own Isaac Hayes in "Truck Turner" -- are on display in Memphis, as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music plays host to the traveling exhibit, "Funky Films & Soundtracks of the '70s."

The exhibit -- which includes soundtrack album art for such Stax hits as "Shaft" and "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" -- will be on display through April 8 at the musuem at 926 E. McLemore.

In conjunction with the Stax exhibit, several blaxploitation films will be screened Feb. 26 at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. "Shaft" plays at 10:30 a.m.; "Foxy Brown" is at 1:30 p.m.; and "Cleopatra Jones" screens at 3:15 p.m. The showings are free for Brooks and Stax museum members; otherwise, regular admission fees apply.

Influential and controversial, the "blaxploitation" genre introduced such actors as Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson and especially Pam Grier as the stylish avatars of a new, aggressive brand of African-American pride and self-reliance, born out of the fires of Watts and Detroit and the blood of King and Malcolm X.

The films allowed black men and women to participate as heroes for the first time in blazing fantasies of revenge and empowerment against evil white people, who often proved to be the ultimate source of ghetto oppression.