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    Sadie Barnette: Gentle People

    Jessica Silverman is thrilled to present “Gentle People,” Sadie Barnette’s first solo show for Art Basel, featuring the artist’s new large scale “FBI Drawings,” her “Text Compositions,” and a curated selection of photographs.

    Barnette’s work reveals quintessential American truths through exploration of her own family history. In dialogue with figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, On Kawara, Felix González-Torres, Outkast and Prince, Barnette’s photographs and drawings make a unique contribution to California social history and global discourses about race, sex and love.

    Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; Cornell Fine Arts Museum; and the Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.

    The “FBI Drawings” are based on a 500-page file amassed by the FBI on Barnette’s father, the founder of the Compton chapter of the Black Panthers. These large-scale works are heavy applications of powdered graphite on stark white paper, which take whole pages from the FBI dossier and overlay them with flowers, Hello Kittys, and other personal tributes. The slow, labor-intensive act of making these drawings gives Barnette the time to meditate on the bravery, politics, and real-lives of people often stripped of their humanity. The drawings are evidence of her “fierce love.”
    With her “Text Compositions,” Barnette tries to fit the biggest ideas into the smallest amount of information. These concepts capture grand and overwhelming social structures that divide and conquer people’s imaginations. As Barnette explains, "My Text Compositions point to, walk around, and dance with ideas too big for words.”
    The photographic works also relate to family, community and activism. A feminine hand holds the macho Black Panther bible, Malcolm X Speaks, suggesting a feminist endorsement and appropriation of the courage and resistance to conformity. A blow up of a found photo of her father, half-brother and two cousins, sitting around the dining room table, speaks of nostalgia and loss. Two of the three boys died before turning twenty.