Works by this artist will be on view beginning August 23, 2013.

In the series Disco Angola Douglas assumed the role of a photojournalist chronicling both the civil war in Angola and the burgeoning underground disco scene of the early 1970s in New York. Using actors and reconstructed sets, the artist draws connections between antiestablishment music and the revolutionary impulse. Evolving out of funk and soul, disco was at its inception an underground phenomenon. Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango is credited for writing the first disco hit, the song “Soul Makossa” (1972), and the movement as a whole took much of its inspiration from the African continent. Adopting the rhetoric of reportage while carefully composing the scenes in the present, the artist explores the idea of historical reconstruction.