Walker Art Center Acquires Sadie Barnette’s “Untitled (People’s World)”
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to announce the acquisition of Sadie Barnette’s Untitled (People's World) by the Walker Art Center, acquired with funds from the McKnight Acquisition Fund. The gallery wishes to thank Henriette Huldisch and the entire team at the Walker for their enthusiastic and generous support of Sadie and her work!
Untitled (People's World) employs 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. The two FBI file pages Sadie features in this piece illustrate the profound level of intrusion Rodney was subjected to throughout the period of his surveillance. The file begins with a description of Rodney’s education history and status and progresses deeper into every aspect of his life - what he reads, his work as a citizen and activist, and into his most personal relationships - all set against the simmering backdrop of Angela Davis's battle against murder and kidnaping charges in Marin County, CA in 1971-1972. The work exposes the fearful realities of state violence concealed within the Bureau’s exhaustive bureaucratic language. Sadie’s bursts of pink aerosol paint on the surface of the FBI files introduce herself into the governmental archive of her father’s personal history, and further asserts a reclamation of Rodney's history from that of an investigative subject to that of a man, a father, and a citizen activist.
Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA, and holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Oakland Museum of California; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others. She lives and works in Oakland, CA, and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Sadie Barnette: Legacy & Legend, a partnership between the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, will debut July 2021.
