Sadie Barnette

Sadie Barnette (born 1984), is an American artist who works primarily with drawing, photography, and large-scale installation. Her work explores Black life, personal histories, and the political through material explorations. She lives in Oakland, California.

Early life Sadie Barnette was born in 1984 in Oakland, California. Barnette's father Rodney Ellis Barnette, was a member of the Black Panther Party who founded the Compton, California chapter in 1968. After founding the chapter, the FBI put Rodney Barnette on the Counterintelligence Program watchlist (COINTELPRO). This FBI program "had successfully carried out a complex network of operations aimed to discredit, dismantle, and destroy Black radical activists, organizations, and movements." Since then, Barnette has used the file as raw material for her work. The file includes various family documents including: family trees, names of relatives, birthdays, military awards, and interviews with her father's employers, high school teachers, and his childhood neighbors. In 2016, Barnette created an installation titled Do Not Destroy which featured selections from the files. This work debuted at the Oakland Museum of California as part of its exhibition All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50. The installation Do Not Destroy then traveled to the "Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York" and became the artist's first solo exhibition in New York City.

Education Barnette holds a BFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts (2006), and an MFA degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego (2012). Her MFA thesis was titled Everything, All the Time, Always, Forever, Still. The written component of this exhibition was an experimental text which Barnette wrote aimed to "use the written word to generate an experience for the reader that functions similarly to one's experience of actually viewing the corresponding art exhibition."

Work Barnette's work takes various forms and uses a variety of media, including drawing, photography, and large-scale installation to explore the relationship between her personal history, black history, US history, and the political. Through the use of found objects, glitter, gold frames, text, family photographs, and her father's (Rodney Barnette) FBI files, her work links her personal and family story to a national and political history. In E-Flux Journal #79, Sampada Aranke writes, For Barnette, her father’s FBI file becomes the source material through which she materializes the complex politics of inheritance between black liberation struggles of the long 1960s and their impacts upon her own sense of self. Barnette mines the FBI file as a personal archive, and in so doing manipulates the documents therein towards a radical aesthetic materialization.

Barnette has an ongoing project titled My Father’s FBI File, 2016- in which, as reported on by ArtForum, "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 semitransparent fields of aerosol paint."

In 2016, Barnette had her first solo show in New York City at the Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, titled Do Not Destroy. For this exhibition, Barnette presented many of her father's FBI files that she intervened in with spray paint and glitter. The artist's marks on the files, "[resemble] an act of vandalism—an invaded home, reshuffled and spattered and spilled-on papers—as much as it does a daughter’s loving, slightly coy stamp on the typewritten documentation of her father’s life. [...] This is ours now, this is mine, her embellishments seem to insist; the fierce, rebellious energy of a crayoned wall or a graffiti-tagged billboard, a sort of Pink Panther mark on a Black Panther life. “I wanted to repair some of the trauma,” Barnette said. Through this exhibition "the work proposes changing the conditions of the world, turning the past of racial profiling into a loyal tribute to her dad." Also in 2021, Barnette's work was featured in the Guggenheim's exhibit, Off the Record.

In 2023, Barnette’s work was featured in a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit “Don't Forget to Call Your Mother.”

Her work is included in the permanent collections of LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Walker Art Center, Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was also Artist-in-Residence), Brooklyn Museum, and the Guggenheim. Art Matters Grant (2016)