Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, drawing, installation
Website: sadiebarnette.com
Sadie Barnette was born and raised in Oakland, California in 1984. Her father, Rodney Barnette, founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968, and the FBI subsequently amassed a 500-page surveillance dossier on him through the COINTELPRO program. That file became the seed of one of Barnette's most significant bodies of work — a lens through which she explores the entanglement of family history, state power, and Black life in America.
Barnette holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has received fellowships from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Artadia, and UC Berkeley's Black Studies Collaboratory, among others.
Barnette works across photography, drawing, installation, sculpture, and text. Her practice is known for its bold visual language — electric pinks, holographic vinyl, glitter, and rhinestones — which she deploys to transform everyday objects and archival materials into something simultaneously celebratory and politically charged. A recurring material is the FBI file itself: in her Dear 1968 series, Barnette overlaid her father's surveillance documents with paint, glitter, and her own marks, reclaiming the archive as a site of beauty and resistance.
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