SADIE BARNETTE PORTFOLIO - CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY
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SADIE BARNETTE PORTFOLIO
SADIE BARNETTE
Sadie Barnette
(b. 1984, Oakland, CA)
Lives and works in Oakland, CA
BFA - California Institute of the Arts
MFA - UC San Diego
Artist in Residence
Studio Museum in Harlem - 2015
Solo Museum Exhibitions
Legacy & Legend
- Benton Museum of Art in conjunction with the Pitzer
College Art Galleries (2021)
The New Eagle Creek Saloon
- Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019)
- The Lab, San Francisco (2019)
Phone Home
- Museum of the African Diaspora (2019)
Dear 1968,…
- Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2018)
- Haverford College (2017)
- Manetti-Shrem Museum @ UC Davis (2017)
Collections
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2018)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2018)
Brooklyn Museum (2018)
Marciano Foundation (2018)
Studio Museum in Harlem (2015/2018)
Berkeley Art Museum (2018)
Pérez Art Museum (2016)
Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin (2017)
California African American Museum (CAAM)(2017)
Haverford College (2018)
Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College (CFAM)(2017)
JP Morgan & Chase Collection (2019)
Oakland Museum of California (2020)
MCA San Diego (2019
SADIE BARNETTE
BIO / STATEMENT
Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie
Barnette’s (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) work relishes in the abstraction of city space
and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. She creates visual
compositions that engage a hybrid aesthetic of minimalism and density, using
text, glitter, family Polaroids, subculture codes and found objects. Recent works
engage as primary source material the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her
father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton, California, chapter of the
Black Panther Party in 1968. In the artist’s hands these repressive documents
are reclaimed — splashed with pink spray paint and adorned with crystals — in an
intergenerational assertion of the power of the personal as political. Barnette’s
work deals in the currency of the real, in earthly acts of celebration and
resistance, but is also tethered to the other-worldly, a speculative fiction, a
galactic escape. As the artist says, “This is abstraction in service of everyday
magic and survival in America.”
Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA
from University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and
residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the
Carmago Foundation in France. She has had solo shows in the following public
institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora,
San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College,
PA; and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Her work is in the permanent
collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Brooklyn Museum,
NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Guggenheim Museum, NY; MCA San Diego; JP Morgan
Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; Cornell Fine Arts Museum; and
the Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA. She is
represented by Charlie James Gallery and Jessica Silverman.
SADIE BARNETTE More Alive
Art Basel Miami Beach OVR
2020
Installation at Charlie James Gallery, 2020
Charlie James Gallery presented a solo presentation of works by Sadie Barnette titled More Alive, featuring six new 45 x 36 inch
powdered graphite on paper drawings and three new photo-based works at the same scale for Art Basel OVR: Miami Beach 2020. Barnette’s
six new works from her “Text Compositions” series employ a playful, familiar visual design sensibility in depicting phrases and words
that appeal to ideas of community, agency, and resilience. Phrases such as We All We Got, Together, Change, People in Motion, and
More Alive provide a chorus of affirmation in direct response to the contemporary moment. Barnette’s photo-based works operate in
ways similar to collage, typically bringing together images from the physical world with suggestions of celestial transcendence.
SADIE BARNETTE More Alive
Art Basel Miami Beach OVR
2020
Installation at Charlie James Gallery, 2020
SADIE BARNETTE More Alive
Art Basel Miami Beach OVR
2020
Installation at Charlie James Gallery, 2020
SADIE BARNETTE In Plain Sight
at Henry Art Gallery
2020
Installation at Henry Art Gallery, 2020
The group exhibition In Plain Sight engages artists whose work addresses narratives, communities, and histories
that are typically hidden or invisible in our public space (both conceptually and literally defined). The
presenting artists approach the exhibition’s theme from a range of directions, varying across all media as well
as aesthetic and conceptual contexts. Works encompass deliberately activist endeavors and direct documentation;
the unpacking of individual histories excluded due to race, ethnicity, or class; explorations of coded language
for protection, secrecy, or both; the illumination of invisible or covert systems of labor, exploitation, and
capitalist control; and translation through surreal, oblique, or fantastical frameworks.
SADIE BARNETTE In Plain Sight
at Henry Art Gallery
2020
Installation at Henry Art Gallery, 2020
SADIE BARNETTE Collective Constellation: Selections
from The Eileen Harris Norton Collection
at Art + Practice
2020
Installation at Art + Practice, 2020
Sadie Barnette’s work is exhibited in Collective
Constellation, which features a selection of
artworks by women of color from the personal art
collection of philanthropist, art collector and
Art + Practice co-founder, Eileen Harris Norton.
The exhibition extends into the A+P Project Room
with an interactive installation entitled FAMILY
STYLE by Sadie Barnette.
SADIE BARNETTE Collective Constellation: Selections
from The Eileen Harris Norton Collection
at Art + Practice
2020
Installation at Art + Practice, 2020SADIE BARNETTE The New Eagle Creek Saloon
at the ICA LA / The Lab
2019
Sadie Barnette’s installation reimagines her father’s bar – the
first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. From 1990-93 Rodney
Barnette operated the New Eagle Creek Saloon, a family-run
business which served a multiracial gay community marginalized by
the racist profiling practices of San Francisco’s bar scene at
that time.
Sadie Barnette’s project is two-fold: to re-present The New Eagle
Creek Saloon as an archival installation via her own vernacular
aesthetic, and to host a “bar” and queer social space where
everyone is invited to participate in ongoing acts of resistance,
celebration, activism, and community building.
Installation at the Lab
2019SADIE BARNETTE The New Eagle Creek Saloon
at the ICA LA / The Lab
2019
Installation at the ICA LA
2019SADIE BARNETTE California Artists
at Marciano Art Foundation
2019
Installation at Marciano Art Foundation
2019SADIE BARNETTE California Artists
at Marciano Art Foundation
2019
Installation at Marciano Art Foundation
2019SADIE BARNETTE The Armory Show
2019
Installation at the Armory Show
2019
The Armory Show and Athena Art Finance Corp. awarded Charlie James Gallery
the third annual Presents Booth Prize for its exemplary presentation of
works by Sadie Barnette.SADIE BARNETTE The Armory Show
2019
Installation at the Armory Show
2019SADIE BARNETTE PHONE HOME at
Museum of African Diaspora
(MoAD) 2019
Installation at Museum of African
Diaspora (MoAD) 2019
Glittering in gold and platinum, the work of Sadie
Barnette illuminates relics of a past deeply rooted in
West Coast aesthetics and politics. A former artist
in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Barnette
presents this installation as an example of a continuous
exchange between two centers of Black artistic production.
Sculptural speakers, “candy-coated” in holographic car
paint, act as both shield and beacon, as the inflection of
prismatic light envelops vestiges of her childhood in the
Bay Area. With bejeweled offerings of Black power politics
and celestial revelry, PHONE HOME provides a refuge for
those seeking moments of comfort in the reflection of
their own light.SADIE BARNETTE PHONE HOME at
Museum of African Diaspora
(MoAD) 2019
Installation at Museum of African
Diaspora (MoAD) 2019SADIE BARNETTE PHONE HOME at
Museum of African Diaspora
(MoAD) 2019
Installation at Museum of African
Diaspora (MoAD) 2019SADIE BARNETTE Black Sky at
Charlie James Gallery
2018
For her second solo show at CJG titled BLACK SKY, Sadie Barnette presented a
combination of objects and installation across two floors of the gallery space.
Barnette continued to explore and reappropriate her family history, using elements of
her father’s FBI file as well as rephotographed photographic images. In the gallery’s
basement project space Barnette created an immersive installation that conflates
domestic space with an imagined, futuristic space.SADIE BARNETTE Black Sky at
Charlie James Gallery
2018
Installation at Charlie James Gallery
2018SADIE BARNETTE Black Sky at
Charlie James Gallery
2018
Installation at Charlie James Gallery
2018Sadie Barnette
CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY
In Sadie Barnette’s photographic collage Untitled (Pink Diamond/ Jump), 2016,
the gleaming facets of a pink diamond adjoin the upper torso of a young black girl
playing in a bounce house. Part of the artist’s recent solo presentation, evocatively
titled “Black Sky,” this image contains references to stereotypical girl culture and
class aspiration, both of which were consistently and vibrantly invoked throughout
Barnette’s expansive, multiroom installation. The upper gallery featured paintings,
photographs, collages, and light boxes, while the lower space, set up to function as
a living room or den, complete with an iridescent couch, was drenched in hot-pink
paint and carpeting. View of Sadie Barnette, 2018. All works untitled, 2018.
The work was hung within the salon-style arrangement of the lower space, and pink version of Untitled (From Here) as a literal background for a combination of objects
thus assumed a familiarity and informality. In conjoining the photographs of the installed on a pink shelf: two gold-glit- ter-encrusted crushed beer cans, a floral baseball
gemstone and the girl (could it be Barnette?), the artist offered the old saw of cap embroidered with the word compton in black letter font, and an Oakland Raiders
abstraction versus representation, but also revealed the ways in which each is souvenir glass. That Compton and Oakland—two California cities with significant black
bound up with the other. The pink diamond is both an accessory marketed to young populations, each of which Barnette lists as her domicile—are separated by more than three
girls within heteronormative culture and an extension of the overt gen- dering that hundred fifty miles further attenuates the seeming straightforwardness of the assemblage.
begins (increasingly, annoyingly) with “gender reveal” parties. This is Barnette’s
wheelhouse, as she has a particular gift for getting into the rough with “girl culture,” Home as a place of safety and intrusion served as another key theme throughout Barnette’s
both adoring its dazzling properties and critiquing its pernicious effects. But the show. In one evocative installa- tion, a gilded mirror was hung on top of a piece of
halving of the otherwise joyous figure, frozen in midair, disturbed any poten- tial for crinkly gold paper (in a playfully tacky doubling of reflective material) and placed kitty-
this work to be read as a representation of an uncomplicated childhood utopia. corner to a photograph of a young Barnette wearing sunglasses and holding a pink bear,
her hair gathered into a glorious side pony. Two stickers of cars were placed above her
Building on these themes and on the geometry of the alluring facets, matrices of shoulders, as if mechanical familiars. In this photograph, which could be viewed straight
various kinds recurred in the exhibition, suggesting at times unity or obstruction. on or via the mirror, Barnette appeared to be at ease, performing a child’s version of cool.
One of the most entrancing examples was Untitled (Fence), 2018, a black-and-white Though a seemingly minor arrangement within the scope of the installation, this pairing
photograph of the whirling shadows cast by a chain-link fence onto the industrial strategically deployed the oppos- ing effects of reflectivity and opacity—by means of
privacy screen covering it. Barnette carefully placed multicolor Swarovski crystals the looking glass and the aloof sunglasses—to bolster a larger argument about home as a
at the intersections of the chain links. The result is a formal investigation that both place of family, politics, and surveillance. For example, hanging nearby were two large
swells and collapses with Bar- nette’s incisive use of gendered materials. Untitled prints that appropriat- ed formerly confidential documents from the FBI file dedicated to
(From Here), 2018, a Risograph print appearing elsewhere in the exhibition, echoed Barnette’s father (an organizer of the Black Panthers), in which key passages were redacted
the form with a smattering of layered spray-paint marks. Sprinkled among these with iridescent tape. Hiding information under the shine, Barnette provocatively used the
was the repeated phrase from here, as though the dots were merely points on a map. supposedly innocuous “girly” material to reveal the entangle- ment of family history, social
This message was given a Janus-faced specificity in Untitled (Compton), 2018, revolution, and governmental suppression in her own childhood.
one of three shelf displays downstairs, wherein Barnette positioned a black- and- —Andy CampbellSADIE BARNETTE Bay Area Now 8 at
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
2018
Installation at YBCA
2018
Sadie Barnette presented a site-specific installation for Bay Area Now 8,
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial survey exhibition.
“From Here,” is a response to the violence and erasure of gentrification
and all other forms of displacement. The avowal “from here” is not territorial -
it is a celebration of Earned Knowledge, specificity, and respecting what came before.SADIE BARNETTE Bay Area Now 8 at
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
2018
Installation at YBCA
2018SADIE BARNETTE Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language
at LACE 2018
Installation at LACE
2018
Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language considers the legacy and diasporic impact
of the visual artist Emory Douglas. As the Minister of Culture of the Black
Panther Party and the graphic artist of the Black Panther Party Newspaper,
Emory Douglas’ vision of black radical politics as a set of aesthetic con-
cerns graphs a grammar of global struggle. This exhibition features historical
Black Panther Party Newspaper’s from Southern California Library, posters of
remixed images by Emory Douglas, and works by Sadie Barnette Juan Capistrán,
Patrick Martinez, and embroideries of Zapantera Negra a project by the Woman’s
Zapatista Embroidery Collective in collaboration with Douglas, organized by
EDELO (En Donde Era La Onu) [Where the United Nations Used to Be] and artists
Caleb Duarte and Mia Eve Rollow in Chiapas, México.SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Installation
at MCA San
Diego
2018
In Dear 1968,… artist Sadie Barnette mines personal and political histories using family
photographs, recent drawings, and selections from the 500-page file that the FBI amassed after
her father joined the Black Panther Party in 1968.
After debuting at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, CA in April 2017, Dear 1968,.,,
traveled to Haverford College and the MCA San Diego in Spring 2018.SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Installation at MCA San Diego
2018SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968)
Two C-prints
Framed: 47 x 41.25 inches/each
Edition of 3
2016SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Untitled (Dad’s Mug Shot) Untitled (J Edgar Hoover)
Graphite on paper Graphite on paper
Paper: 30 x 22 inches Paper: 30 x 22 inches
Framed: 33.5 x 26 inches Framed: 33.5 x 26 inches
2016 2016SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Installation at MCA San Diego
2018SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Untitled (Rodney Barnette’s name added Untitled (Black Laws for All Untitled (Hoover Signature)
to the “Adex list: Program for Ap- Black People) Laser print with
prehension and Detention,” a list of Laser print with rhinestones on plexi
American citizens that could be de- aerosol paint on plexi 10.5 x 8.75 x .75 inches
tained without due process) 10.5 x 8.75 x .75 inches 2017
Laser print with 2017
aerosol paint and
rhinestones on plexi
10.5 x 8.75 x .75 inches
2017SADIE BARNETTE Dear 1968,...
MCA San Diego 2018
Installation at MCA San Diego
2018SADIE BARNETTE Compland at
Fort Gansevoort 2017
Installation at Fort Gansevoort
2017Sadie Barnette @ FORT GANSEVOORT GALLERY Chloe Wyma, December 2017 On the ground floor of Sadie Barnette’s solo exhibition, a group of five framed and enlarged COINTELPRO- era documents, sporadically misted with passages of black and hot-pink spray paint, reported that Rodney Ellis Barnette was observed wearing a postal uniform at a meeting of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles on December 18, 1968. Barnette, we learned, was also “living with a woman to whom he was not married” at the time and, on June 6, 1969, received a letter from the US Civil Service Commission advising that he did “not meet the suitability requirements for employment in the competitive Federal service because of immoral conduct.” Titled My Father’s FBI File: Government Employee, 2017, this cache of documents revealing the FBI’s covert dismissal of Rodney Barnette, father of the artist and founder of the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party – is part of the Sadie’s Barnette’s ongoing project, My Father’s FBI File, 2016-. In this body of work, Barnette detourns documents from five hundred pages of surveillance – obtained by the Barnette family via the Freedom of Information Act – into text-based artworks touched with stains and semi- transparent fields of aerosol paint. The title of Barnette’s show, “Compland,” invokes a fictive space sublating Compton and Oakland, California, ‘90s hip-hop, and ‘60s Black Power. Blackness – its social constructions, structures of signification, material cultures, oppressions, and modes of resistance – is pronounced and urgent in Barnette’s work. The color pink also presents again and again, from baby to bubble-gum to hot fuchsia, in the pulsating chevrons of Barnette’s tessellated photo-wallpaper that showed a child sitting in a wicker “Huey Newton” chair; in the bags of Hello Kitty cotton candy strewn around the gallery; and in an acrylic glitter bar – part object, part sculpture – installed on the third floor. Pink spelled out PRESTO DINERO (I LEND MONEY) on a Spanish-language payday loan sign, supplied the ground in the abstract painting Untitled (Black dots on pink), 2016, and popped Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File: Government Employee (detail), 2017, from behind a chain-link fence embellished with Swarovski crystals in the photograph Untitled (Pink fence five ink-jet prints, each 22 × 17”. sparkle), 2017. In the photocollage Untitled (Pointing in pink), 2017, a tiny foreshortened cutout of Rodney Barnette stood inside a glittering artery that tunneled into a depthless pink hole. The work belongs to a group, displayed in a salon-style hang, where vernacular photographs – some of the artist’s family members, others taken on the streets of Oakland- are ensconced within sparkling, crystalline sur- faces. While one might assume that such embellishment would occlude the photos’ evidentiary status, or even seem to mockingly undercut their value as documents or testimony, the effect was the rhinestone appliqués – supplemented and amplified the viewer’s sense of these photographs as indexical traces of the real. In perhaps the deepest and most ambitious piece of criticism of Barnette’s work to date, Sampada Aranke has situated the artist within “contemporary black radical aesthetic practices that […] ineluc- tably trouble, if not unravel, the panoptic qualities of the visual itself” and “disturb visibility as a measure of black presence.” Dramatizing the spray paint’s obfuscatory force on the text, Aranke’s reading of My Father’s FBI File foregrounds an anti-ocular turn in black aesthetics that values opacity as a strategy of resistance against policing and surveillance, as well as a deliverance from retrograde and essentialist expectations that artists of color “represent the race” in sloganeering or ethnographic ways. Nonetheless, it seems counterintuitive to read a body of work that so explicitly stages the operations of transparency, exposé, and enlightenment according to their opposites. In its revelatory capacity, “Compland” embarrasses current center-liberal fantasies of the deep state as a beneficent and redemptive force in American politics. It also forces a confrontation between art’s communicative and abstracting potencies, between depth and surface, opacity and iridescence. Better than critiquing ocularcentrism, Barnette exposes the brilliance in its contradictions.
SADIE BARNETTE Do Not Destroy at
Baxter Street Camera Club
New York 2017
Installation at Baxter Street Camera Club New York
2017Black Panthers 50 years on: art show reclaims movement
by telling ‘real story’ - Maria L La Ganga
The end of an official letter, much enlarged, frames Sadie Barnette’s profile. “Very truly yours,”
it reads, “J Edgar Hoover.” Behind the 32-year-old artist is a wall covered in pink glitter. A single
drawing hangs in its center, a black man’s mugshot rendered in pencil.
The images form the heart of Barnette’s latest work, an installation at the Oakland Museum of Cali-
fornia. They come from a Black Panther’s FBI file – hundreds of pages recounting years of covert
surveillance in search of something, anything, to pin on the activist.
Former Black Panther Rodney Barnette with his daughter Sadie Barnette in
To the government, the young black man was a dangerous extremist. To Compton, his southern front of an art exhibit she created in honor of him at the Oakland Museum.
California home, he was a community organizer. At the museum, he is part of a new exhibition Photograph: Josh Edelson for the Guardian
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther party.
To Barnette, he is a rich subject to tap for making art. He is also Dad. he was very much targeted.”
Rodney E Barnette, now a soft-spoken 72-year-old, opened the Black Panthers’ Compton office. He The Panthers’ golden anniversary is more than just a historic milestone.
lived with Angela Davis during her trial on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. Although It plays out against a backdrop of Black Lives Matter activism and an
the FBI investigation came up empty, it cost him his job as a letter carrier for the US Postal Ser- unending stream of , usually of young African American and Latino
vice. men, many unarmed, against reports of ongoing police surveillance of
protesters and of technology that can intrude on private lives with just a
What is left of the federal investigation is more than 500 pages that Sadie Barnette has turned into keystroke.
raw material. The documents include a veritable family tree, listing relatives’ names, birthdays and
military awards. There are interviews with her father’s employers, his high school teachers, his It is a Monday afternoon in late September, and the former Black Panther
childhood neighbors. FBI agents from at least eight cities were involved; their names punctuate the is viewing his daughter’s work for the first time.
file and Sadie Barnette’s work.
Spread across two full walls, the work includes 198 life-sized replicas
“In a way, it feels like family history that someone might write in a family Bible,” she said. “But of FBI documents. Some have big gaps where the government excised
it’s coming from this very aggressive, violent place of trying to dismantle what my dad was work- blocks of information. Others have been embellished by Sadie Barnette
ing on. The redactions, the time stamps, the hand-written notes, it makes me realize how lucky my herself with splotches of black that resemble bullet holes or a fine mist of
dad is to be alive, honestly. pink spray paint.
“Because so many members are listed in the documents,” she continued. “There’s one page where There’s a polaroid of Rodney Barnette – 13 and smiling, surrounded by
it lists a bunch of different former Panther members and in parentheses [after each one] it says, family members – and Sadie Barnette’s re-creation of her father’s mug-
‘deceased’, ‘deceased’, ‘deceased’. Except for my dad’s name. Which really made me realize that shot.Black Panthers 50 years on: art show reclaims movement
by telling ‘real story’ - Maria L La Ganga (pg.2)
Most of the document pages can be easily deciphered. On one, there is a single sentence, recom-
mending that Rodney Barnette be placed on a list of people who were considered an immediate
threat to national security.
“My first thought is, wow, all the time and energy they wasted,” the elder Barnette said as his eyes
scanned the file pages. The government “went to my neighbors where I was born … They went to
my jobs. The main thing is they tried to get me fired from the job I had at the post office. Splotches that resemble bullet holes are featured on some replicas of FBI docu-
ments. Photograph: Josh Edelson for the Guardian
“And they did, based on my living with a woman that I was cohabiting with I wasn’t married to,”
he continued. “Conduct unbecoming of a government employee … I’m sure nobody had done that
before, living with a woman they weren’t married to.”
Sadie Barnette’s work is also a kind of restoration, a way to take her fa-
Rodney Barnette joined the Black Panthers straight out of the army as a response, he said, to police ther’s story back from the government and embrace it in her own fashion.
actions in the US. He had been wounded in Vietnam, was awarded a Purple Heart, “witnessed hor- Hence the glitter wall.
rors over there, people died in my arms”. But black men were dying in the US, too, he said, some
of them in his own Los Angeles neighborhood. “It’s bringing in the element of girldom and both trying to reclaim some
power and making this mine again and ours again,” she said as she es-
“It was wrong the way the community was being treated,” said the retired labor organizer. The po- corted her father through the installation. “It’s similar to how I’ve spray-
lice “were conducting military operations in a black community. Somebody robbed a bank, alleg- painted on some of the pages.
edly black, and they were on a search-and-destroy mission. That’s what we did in Vietnam, except
that they dropped us off in helicopters in Vietnam, and we had to jump out. “It’s my way of putting my mark on the files and trying to reclaim it. Now
we’re telling the story and using the information to tell the real story.”
“I didn’t know how popular the Panthers were at the time,” he continued, “but I decided I would
join. Thousands of people were members, and they were doing a lot of good things. It felt really
good that I had joined. I didn’t know it would be under such assault by the government, but that’s
what happened.”
Rene de Guzman, who curated All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, said the exhibit is a
way to reclaim and explain a movement that is often viewed as simply “black men with guns. What
we’re offering is a more complete picture.”SADIE BARNETTE All Power to the People: Black
Panthers at 50 at
Oakland Museum of California
October 2017
Sadie Barnette participated in the group exhibition, “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” at
Oakland Museum of California, on view from October 2016 to February 2017. Sadie’s father, Rodney Barnette
started the Compton chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968 and was put under surveillance by the FBI.
Sadie used the Freedom of Information Act to retrieve her father’s 500-page FBI file and has used the pages
in a number of subsequent projects.SADIE BARNETTE EXPO CHICAGO
Solo Booth
September 2016
Untitled (White
Untitled cans)
(Beer cans) Collage on
Collage on holographic
glitter and paper
holographic papers 15.25 x 15.5
15.25 x 15.5 inches
inches Framed
Framed 2016
2016
Untitled Untitled
(Palm Tree) (Two Horses)
Collage on Graphite on
glitter papers racing form on
15.25 x 15.5 glitter paper
inches 15.25 x 15.25
Framed inches
2016 2016SADIE BARNETTE Superfecta at Charlie
James Gallery 2015
Installation at Charlie James Gallery
2015SADIE BARNETTE Superfecta at Charlie
James Gallery 2015
Untitled (Racing Forms 1-9)
Graphite on found racing forms mounted
on paper on plexiglass (yellow)
36 x 36 inches
2015SADIE BARNETTE Superfecta at Charlie
James Gallery 2015
Untitled (Pony ride,
Compton, CA)
Archival pigment print
in lightbox
24 x 32 inches
Edition of 3
2015Superfecta at Charlie
James Gallery 2015
Review : Sadie Barnette’s ‘Superfecta’ and the bets of the art world
By Christopher Knight | February 1, 2016
Superfecta,” the title work in Sadie Barnette’s impressive Los Angeles solo gallery
debut, casts a sharp and witty side-eye on the state of today’s art world. It’s a love-
hate theme that runs through her show.
At Charlie James Gallery, the word is drawn in dark graphite on white paper, lower
on the left than on the right, its invocation of making a long-shot wager on a horse
race presented as a steep climb. At the word’s end, a spritz of black spray-paint turns
the superfecta into something between a smudge and a dark shooting star.
It’s reminiscent of the jaunty Spam can in Ed Ruscha’s great 1962 painting, “Actual
Size,” an advertising label for a canned good that is turned into an unnatural comet
shooting across the canvas. Barnette’s drawing is mounted on a 36-by-44-inch sheet
of orange plexiglass that pulls in ambient light, framing the sentiment with a subtle,
queasy glow.
Barnette uses sheets torn from the daily racing form as the paper for most of her
drawings. Numbers one through nine, alternating between positive and negative
stencil-shapes in the manner of Jasper Johns, are drawn in silvery graphite that oblit- Sadie Barnette, “Untitled (Go, go, go) (detail),” 2015, graphite on paper and pink
erates much of the surface. plexiglass.
What peeks through is sporting information about competition. There are lists of
contesting horses, an avalanche of statistics, trumpeted purses that an eager bettor
might reap and ads that pitch a variety of handicapping aids. Today’s behemoth art market, which subsumes artistic engagement within guesses about the potential
for assorted asset classes, looms.
One triptych further ups the ante. At the left, a jockey on horseback furiously pushes his steed forward. At the right, an American flag sags, drooping along the bot-
tom of the sheet.
And in the center, the excited chant of the fans -- go, go, go, go -- is repeated more than 20 times across the underlying racing form. The sly invocation of global
art dealer Larry Gagosian, nicknamed “Go-go” by the art world, seals the deal.SADIE BARNETTE Studio Museum
Residency 2014
Sadie Barnette was one of three annual Artists in
Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, culminating Installation at Studio Museum in Harlem
in the exhibition “Everything, Everyday: Artists in 2014
Residence 2014–15”.SADIE BARNETTE Graduate work
UC San Diego
Martin Luther King
& 37th Street
Mural
2011
Installation at
University of
California, San Diego
While studying to receive her MFA at the University of California, San Diego, Barnette created a public arts mural
installation for Thurgood Marshall College, titled “Martin Luther King & 37th Street” in celebration of the college’s
40th Anniversary and the university’s 50th Anniversary.
The mural is an optical illusion at the entrance of Thurgood Marshall College. It is designed to transport visitors to
an urban corner with a street sign bearing King’s name. The presence of the sign is an homage to the efforts involved
in memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. through the renaming of city streets and the establishment of his birthday as a
recognized national holiday. The piece also cultivates a tension between the aspirations of Martin Luther King Jr, and
the realities of the neighborhoods these boulevards consistently traverse.SADIE BARNETTE
CV
Education 2017 “Dear 1968,...” Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford
College, Pennsylvania
2012 Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts, University of “Compland,” Fort Gansevoort, New York NY
California, San Diego CA “Dear 1968,...” Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis
2006 Bachelor of Fine Arts, California Institute of the Arts, “Do Not Destroy,” Baxter St at CCNY, New York NY
Valencia CA 2016 “FROM HERE,” Jenkins-Johnson Gallery, San Francisco CA
“Superfecta,” Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles CA
Grants and Fellowships 2013 “Composed and Performed,” Ever Gold Gallery, San
Francisco CA
2019 Headlands Center for the Arts Residency 2012 “Everything, All The Time, Always,” Double Break
2019 SECA Award Finalist Gallery, San Diego CA
2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
2018 The Carmago Foundation, Cassis France 2010 “Light/Weight,” Zughaus Gallery, Berkeley CA
2017 Artadia Grant, San Francisco awardee “Graph,” Visual Arts Department, UCSD
Art Matters Grant awardee 2008 “Baby Needs New Shoes,” Fur Gallery, Los Angeles CA
2016 Artist in Residence, The Hermitage, Englewood FL 2006 “LA Face With A Oakland Booty,” CalArts Lime Gallery,
2015 Artist in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Valencia CA
NY
2012 Vermont Studio Center residency fellowship, Johnson VT Select Group Exhibitions
2011 Thurgood Marshall College artist in residence,
University of California, San Diego CA 2020 “Barring Freedom”, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
2009 Diversity Fellowship Award, University of California, “1 Million Roses for Angela Davis”, Kunsthalle im
San Diego CA Lipsiusbau, Dresden, Germany
2004 Undergraduate Multicultural Scholarship, Getty Center, “Sanctuary: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent
Los Angeles CA Collection”, California African American Museum, Los
2002 Youth Catalyst Grant, City of Oakland, CA Angeles, CA
“Collective Constellation: Selections from The Eileen
Harris Norton Collection”, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, CA
Solo Exhibitions “Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family
Collection of Contemporary Art”, Lehman College Art
2021 Solo Exhibition, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, Gallery, Bronx, NY
CA 2019 “In Plain Sight”, Henry Art Center, Seattle, WA
“Legacy and Legend”, Benton Museum of Art in conjunction “Contextual Proportions”, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San
with Pitzer Art Gallery Francisco, CA
2020 “More Alive”, Art Basel Miami Beach OVR, Charlie James “To Reflect Us”, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Gallery “Presence”, Fullerton College Art Gallery, Fullerton, CA
2019 “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” The Institute of “California Artists in the Marciano Collection,” Marciano
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
“The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” The Lab, San Francisco, CA “Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family
“PHONE HOME”, Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD), San Collection,” Concordia College, New York, NY
Francisco, CA “Solidarity Struggle Victory,” Southern Exposure, San
Solo Presentation, The Armory Art Fair, New York, NY Francisco, CA
2018 “Dear 1968,...” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA “Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary”,
BLACK SKY, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA
“Lost and Found in America”, Florida Museum ofSADIE BARNETTE
CV
Photographic Arts, Tampa, Florida 2015 “Young, Gifted and Black,” curated by Hank Willis
“Gold Standard”, Ever Gold {Projects}, San Francisco, CA Thomas, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
2018 “A Recounting – Data, Disinformation, & Black “Everything, Everyday,” Artist in Residence exhibition,
Experience”, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY
“That’s On Me,” curated by Lauren Halsey, Paris Blues,
“Bay Area Now 8“, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San New York, NY
Francisco, CA “American Survey Pt. 1,” Papillion, Los Angeles CA
“Way Bay 2“, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA “Incognito 2015,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa
“Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language“, LACE, Los Monica CA
Angeles, CA “The Silence of Ordinary Things,” The Mistake Room, Los
“Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin Angeles CA
DeWoody Collection, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA 2014: “At Sixes and Sevens,” Pieter, Los Angeles CA
“All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” “Incognito,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica CA
Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle WA “5 Year Anniversary,” Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco
“Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal,” Pitzer College Art CA
Galleries, CA 2013 “Present Tense Future Perfect,” curated by Teka Selman,
“Black is a Color,” Antenna Gallery, New Orleans LA Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami FL
2017 “Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance,” MOCAD, Detroit “Connection, Reflection,” curated by Nikki Pressley,
MI Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles CA
“Black is a Color,” Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles “Art Intersections,” Smithsonian Asian-Latino “pop-up”
CA museum, Washington DC
“Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture,” “The Matter at Hand,” Dagny + Barstow, New York NY
California African American Museum, Los Angeles CA 2012 “FORE,” Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY
“Over The Rainbow,” Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles CA “Sueños Libres, West Coast Soñazos,” Self Help Graphics,
“Museum of Capitalism,” Oakland CA East Los Angeles CA
“Excerpt,” Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY
“A New Look,” Monique Meloche, Chicago IL
“Now More Than Always,” Gildar Gallery, Denver CO Selected Collections
“March Madness,” Fort Gansevoort, New York NY
“A Mere Sum of Parts,” Charlie James Gallery, Los Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2018)
Angeles CA Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2018)
“Humanity Today,” Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco Brooklyn Museum (2018)
CA Marciano Foundation (2018)
2016 “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” Oakland Studio Museum in Harlem (2015/2018)
Museum of California Berkeley Art Museum (2018)
“Taking Place: Selections from the Permanent Pérez Art Museum (2016)
Collection,” California African American Museum, Los Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin (2017)
Angeles CA California African American Museum (CAAM)(2017)
“Life During Wartime,” Diane Rosentein Gallery, Los Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College (CFAM)(2017)
Angeles CA Haverford College (2018)
“After Pop Life,” curated by Glen Helfand, Minnesota JP Morgan & Chase Collection (2019)
Street Project, San Francisco CA Oakland Museum of California (2020)
“Southland,” Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles CA MCA San Diego (2019)
“March Madness,” Fort Gansevoort, New York NYYou can also read
