Sadie Barnette: Legacy & Legend

Sadie Barnette’s celebratory installations explore collective and familial histories in glittering, speculative spaces.

Oakland-based multimedia artist Sadie Barnette (born 1984) has made groundbreaking explorations of her own family’s history and archives. She situates her father Rodney Barnette’s activism, including his founding of the Black Panther chapter in Compton, CA, and his surveillance by the FBI, in the social history of California and global histories of resistance against racial injustice.

Through government documents, photography, writing, installation and her signature use of hot pink, Barnette transforms the bond between father and daughter into an art that speaks to the power of community action. This volume features several new works created for the exhibition, as well as a reproduction of the zine Barnette created as a tribute to her father’s New Eagle Creek Saloon, the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco.

Sadie Barnette is a 2014-15 Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Alumni. 

Editor(s): Ciara Ennis, Rebecca McGrew
Author(s):Sadie Barnette, Ciara Ennis, Rujecko Hockley, Victoria Sancho Lobis

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Hardcover, Distributed Art Publishers, 2022
96 p, 7.25 × 9.5  in.

Photos by Ian Byers-Gamber