Sadie Barnette: Family Business

Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice explores her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. Fascinated with the personal and political value of kin, her work highlights the love and humanity cultivated in familial spaces. Barnette reanimates an alternate history of Black America, one shaped by state-sanctioned terror but also by love, celebration, and the fullness of human relationships. Sadie Barnette: Family Business brings together a selection of photographs, drawings, and sculptures around a newly commissioned video, which consider the living room as a site of freedom. 

Sadie Barnette: Family Business is a multi-sited exhibition, taking place at Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz (IAS) and SJMA, and co-organized by UCSC Professor Gina Dent, SJMA chief curator Lauren Schell Dickens, and Dr. Rachel Nelson, director of IAS. It is commissioned as part of Visualizing Abolition, an ongoing initiative exploring art, prisons, and justice, collaboratively organized by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz and San José Museum of Art. Sadie Barnette: Family Business opens at the IAS on April 28 and will be on view through September 3, 2023.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA, where she currently lives and works. Barnette 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, 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; the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis; the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College; and The Kitchen in New York. Her work is in many permanent collections, including the San José Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Pérez Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Walker Art Center, as well as a permanent, site-specific commission at the Los Angeles International Airport forthcoming in 2024.