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In her approach, she doesn’t just display the documents as is.
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When the FBI documents-500 pages in total, covering seemingly mundane but also intensely private details of her father’s life-arrived four or five years later, Barnette started integrating them into her practice first, as material in her first solo show in San Francisco, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in 2016-which ran concurrently with her installation of similar work in a group exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California-and then within countless other shows over the years. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
NEW YORK EAGLE GAY BAR TRIAL
He founded the Compton chapter of the organization in 1968 stood guard for Angela Davis as she awaited trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in 1970 and was for years deeply involved in Black revolutionary activism. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Rodney was a Black Panther. In 2011, when Barnette was working on her MFA at the University of California, San Diego, her father suggested that they submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the surveillance file the FBI had once compiled on him. In the last five years or so, the Oakland-based artist has centered her practice on her father’s past. “I was entranced by the stories and the performing of stories and the gatherings and the history and seeing so much of American history contained just within the living room,” she says. Back in high school, she says she took up photography as “a way of seeing the world or a way of engaging with the world as a witness” realizing how political even her own personal history was, she has nurtured a documentary impulse ever since. The “New Eagle Creek Saloon” was hardly the first time Barnette has pulled from her family’s history for her work. It made sense to make it look like me dreaming in my aesthetic about the bar.” “So it didn’t make sense to make my installation look like the original bar. From that moment on, the bar lived on in her imagination as a “larger than life a mythical, fantastical space,” she recalls. It was like being a part of the Black past, present, and future, all at once.
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The event conjures up memories of being surrounded by an exuberant group of Black pharaohs and Black robots and Black astronauts. And it really ends up being kind of a community center, a safe haven.”Īs Barnette remembers it, the theme for the float was “Black people through the ages.” She was dressed up as a Black Victorian. “So it really was out of necessity-for the dignity of being cute and Black and gay in San Francisco in the 1990s that he set up this bar. Rodney opened the bar “because of the racism that he and his multiracial group of gay friends experienced at white gay bars in San Francisco,” Barnette explains. At the time, the bar was sponsoring a float for the 1992 San Francisco Pride Parade. Sadie, now 37, was seven years old when her dad first took her to the New Eagle Creek Saloon on Market Street. Installation view, Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” at the Kitchen, New York. This presentation at the Kitchen, and in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, is its first on the East Coast. Digging a little deeper into “New Eagle Creek,” though, there is far more to the installation than first meets the eye-which is why, in the last two years, it has traveled to venues including the Lab in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. On the days when madison moore, assistant professor of queer studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Kitchen’s first nightlife and club culture resident, is hosting DJ events in the gallery, it’ll be a raucous dance party, invoking the spirit of queer nightlife.Īs Barnette sees it, expressions of pleasure and joy are legitimate responses to the work-the bar, in its day, generated quite a bit of both for its patrons. Photo: Adam Reich.Īnd this is what the installation will be for a lot of people.