Sadie Barnette Correcting Her Father’s Past


Can you describe what happened in the study? It was made from two pages of the 500-page surveillance file the FBI had collected on my father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton branch of the Black Panther Party in 1968. My family filed a FOIA claim in 2011, and after about five years we finally got the file.

The file is simultaneously chilling, emotional, disturbing, and violent. Surveillance sometimes seems like a harmless information-gathering process, but most often it is harassment, intimidation, and agent provocateurs. In 1969 my father was fired from his post office job for his political activism. My first reaction to these documents was: one, this is terrible, and two, luckily my father survived and I’m lucky that I live. I thought how can I get this material back. How can I highlight my father and our family history, which is the history of many other families in this country? So the work is certainly about some degree of improvement and restoration, but it is not in itself aimed at repairing the damage. It’s more about a repair journey. Or about repair as a practice, a meditation.

I created a giant stencil, a machine cut it out, then I laid it on paper and brushed graphite over the surface.. The result looks like a carbon copy. The white-on-black text has a ghostly element. I am always careful to interact with source material, but I do not compete with it – or alter factual information.

At 4 by 5 feet, the diptych is quite large. I really wanted him to face you on a human scale. The first panel shows a page dated May 25, 1972. From a time when the FBI essentially lost my father. I love this slippery moment of the unknown. The page reads “residence unknown” and “employment unknown”. The agency later found its address because it was tracking subscriptions to the communist newspaper “People’s World”.

The second panel is a criminal record that looks almost like a silkscreen-printed political poster, as the photo has been photocopied and re-photographed multiple times. I was thinking about how trophy shots can instantly criminalize and dehumanize someone, turn them into numbers. I pictured this photo on hundreds of FBI desks and imagined how expendable my father was, an “extremist,” according to his agents. My experience was: If I hand-painted this painting with an alchemy of love and labor, could I transform it into something else? Can I turn it into a portrait of a father who dares to dream of a new world? It was really pleasing to draw the roses with colored pencil. The colors hit the graphite in a way that makes the flowers look like stickers. I was thinking about domestic spaces and grooming rituals, how we give each other flowers to say “I love you” or mourn at funerals and commemorate loved ones.



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