SIMONE BROWNE AND SADIE BARNETTE
Author illustrations by Loveis Wise
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. It took place in October 2017.
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Dad 1966 and 1968), 2017
Archival inkjet prints on custom vinyl wallpaper, 47 x 96 in.
Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery
One of the things that’s been really important to me in thinking about surveillance is how artists, and particularly Black artists, through the expressive work that they do, provide a way of thinking about surveillance, theorizing surveillance, and also disrupting its sources and methods. I’m thinking of Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair”1 or even the poet Ashaki M. Jackson’s collection of poetry where she explores what happens to us, as Black people, when we continually consume the never-ending list of video footage of police killing Black people—the choke holds, the sounds of the gunshots, the grief.2 That kind of way of exploring surveillance through creative text, for me, is what brought me to your Dear 1968 show. I hope you could explain it a bit to me more, how you work with the declassified files from the FBI’s years-long surveillance of your father, Rodney Barnette, beginning in the 1960s. You make them tell a different story from the one that the FBI is giving us with their redactions and the various memos that try to situate your father as an internal threat to national security. I was shocked—but to see the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s signature and his chilling sign-off of “very truly yours,” that’s just to show you how close they were. By that I mean how close the state’s crosshairs were trained on your father. It was startling for me. So I’m going to start by asking you to say a little bit about the work that you did with Dear 1968 and My Father’s FBI Files. Can you tell me about your creative labor and what it meant for you to work with these documents? |
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Sadie Barnette: |
Four years after my family filed a Freedom of Information Act request, we were all surprised by the size and scope of what we received—over 500 pages of really intense surveillance, intimidation, and harassment. I think sometimes the word “surveillance” can take a benign, passive tone—like COINTELPRO was merely information gathering—but within these pages are articulations of infiltration, disruption, disinformation, and the undoing of lives. |
Browne: |
There’s really a lot of violence and suppression that came with it. |
Barnette: |
Yes. After we received the FBI files and started going through them together as a family, I knew the documents would make their way into my work and that it was my duty, and honor, to try to tell my father’s side of the story. The challenge was finding a way to do that in which I’m not getting in the way of how powerful this source material is, how frightening it is, and how emotional it is, but at the same time reclaiming the narrative and celebrating the resistance. The first time I allowed this work to be exhibited was at the Oakland Museum’s “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” anniversary show in 2016. Because the project is so personal as well as political, I didn’t want it to be in the wrong hands. The Black Panthers are often simplified and aestheticized. The story just becomes about the leather jackets and the guns. People forget about the international and intersectional politics, the class analysis, and the life-saving community service programs they initiated. But I knew the Oakland Museum’s mission was to offer a deeper understanding and contextualization of the history of the Panthers and I trusted that my work would be supported by a multi-layered investigation and celebration of Oakland history. So I had to figure out what material interventions I would take to create the work. The FBI pages are black-and-white, heavily redacted and punctuated with officious markings and handwritten margin notes. I splashed the pages with bright pink spray paint gestures pointing to graffiti and “tagging” (an act of reclamation), to my own lexicon of redactions and the unknowable, and to the “girldom” of this father-daughter conversation. I wanted the viewer constantly reminded that this person is a father, while being targeted by our government as a subversive. Really what’s at stake in this activism is fighting for families, trying to create a world where little Black children can be fed and can have childhoods and can grow up and rise without being cut short by the police. I also adorned pages with pastel rhinestones, hearts, and crowns, in an attempt to heal some of the pain and violence and to honor the names of those listed in the files who did not live to tell. |
Browne: |
Why did you choose to bring that kind of bling and shining into your work? And I’m thinking of the role of Black brilliance. I was thinking of Ralph Ellison when he talks about the hyper-visibility of Black people creating something around the White gaze that leaves Black people and their bodies unseen. The B-side of that is that Black brilliance becomes unseen by the White gaze. But we always see our brilliance, you know? |
Barnette: |
I really like that reading. There was a moment in my installation at the Oakland Museum that consisted of a single pencil drawing hanging on a nine-foot-long magenta pink glitter-wall. The drawing is of the only image that appears in the FBI file: a mug shot of my father. I wanted to transcend the dehumanizing function of a mug shot by rendering the image by hand in detailed mark-making and restoring my father’s individuality. The drawing occupies a small amount of space on the paper, and a small amount of space on the glittering wall, but demands to be seen. This bling and pink glitter I also thought would be what J. Edgar Hoover would hate the most. In other iterations of my work, glitter and reflective surfaces serve as a kind of placeholder for imagined liberated spaces. In the photos and collages that depict more contemporary West Coast/Oakland landscapes and people, I often insert otherworldly sparkle to suggest a dimension beyond the reach of state surveillance, beyond gentrification and police brutality—what do cities look like for Black people without those things? And I don’t always know the answer, you know? But we have to believe they’re possible in order to work for them. So the glitter-scapes provide space to imagine… |
That’s a good entry to get into your exhibition Compland, and this piece being about new forms of imaginaries and new forms of spaces. It’s a very rich, evocative, almost visual love letter to what you call a disappearing Black city. What does it mean to love Black places and Black faces when they’re disappearing? |
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Barnette: |
A “visual love letter,” I like that. Someone asked me recently what role love plays in my work. I suppose it is a very loving act to look at and document each other. |
Browne: |
That’s a system of love that I think is captured in such an amazing way and that works. |
Barnette: |
And it’s a love for family—a love for the way we’ve survived and thrived and held each other up, from public spaces of protest to “living room” sanctuaries. Combing through page after page of state-sanctioned attempts to discredit, frame, and destroy my father and his activism, I realized how lucky I am that he is alive, that I was born. So there is a joy and aliveness in the work, a celebration of resilience. There’s also a level of restraint or distance that I try to play with in my work. That’s why I use the formal strategies that I do, be it minimalism or playing with size and scale, making the figures so small, the hand-drawn elements concealing their own labor, a coolness and synthetic materials…I’m not giving full access to the intimacy of this family. There’s still something that’s guarded and protected. Does that make sense? |
Browne: |
It does make sense. I want to talk a little bit about place-making or guarding. There’s an MLK Boulevard in every city. I’m here in Austin and the MLK Boulevard is increasingly becoming a gentrified space with coffee shops and little cupcake shops, where Black people and Latinx people are being pushed out of the areas in which they historically had lived post-emancipation here in Austin. I love what Untitled (Lady with Glitter) represents. Could you tell me a bit more about that moment, and what that piece means to you when we think about what it means to witness disappearing Black cities? |
Barnette: |
Yes, I saw this woman sitting in her walker, catching the sunshine in front of this teal stucco, very California-looking building…she just caught my eye when I was walking down MLK Blvd. I don’t often take pictures of people I don’t know but she was just so compelling to me. I asked her if I could take her photograph and she just lit up when I asked. She was happy to be seen, I think. I imagine that she has witnessed so much and for me to see her was an acknowledgment of that. Later when I looked at the photo, how she’s in front of these two big garage doors—I just imagined that she was, like, the gatekeeper of another reality. So I cut away one of the doors and collaged in the glitter/holographic element to suggest a magic portal. Perhaps she’s guarding this portal to a parallel-Oakland universe where she can’t be displaced. I think about those spaces a lot, being born and raised in Oakland and seeing the rapid gentrification that happens so fast here that it just feels violent, and like an erasure. That’s where my title Compland comes from—it imagines a mythical cultural space, though geographically impossible, blending the cities of Compton and Oakland in an act of preservation. |
Browne: |
I just want to move on to the question that I asked you about when I met with you at Fort Gansevoort. I was asking you about whether you had any soundtrack to your work as you’re working or as you’re thinking about it. In my head I was guessing probably, like, Kendrick Lamar, something uniquely West Coast. But when I asked that question, you turned me around and I faced your work Untitled (Gotta Broken Heart). And it was Prince—Prince Rogers Nelson. |
Barnette: |
Yes, one of what will probably be my many homages to Prince. I used what I call an “in-camera-collage” technique to rephotograph an image from his Dirty Mind album. I actually made the photograph of him before he passed away, but of course after he died, it just looked like he was in this stately rest. So I hung the photo above an all-white keyboard that I made to reference the white bicycles seen in street memorials. These elements hang in a corner of the gallery that has a bar feature so I covered the bar in purple glitter plexi to create a space meant for toasting and celebrating the legacy of Prince. I’ve just always thought that Prince had this way of using things that seem purely aesthetic or frivolous in the service of a powerful assertion of individuality and confrontation of patriarchy and racism, in a way where lace or leather can become these really charged tools. When Prince died I was just devastated. Normally I find it ridiculous when people are mourning celebrities that they don’t know. But I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t in any type of big-picture mood about it. I was really into being on the same planet as Prince. |
Browne: |
You mentioned this effortless cool—and that effortlessness, seemingly—but it came with a cost on his body, the toll that he paid for. The night you mentioned that we have to protect our cool or brilliance, or protect our Blackness or Black people, and I think that will get us to the last question about Black futurity. What is the world that you’re working toward? In terms of abolition, in terms of survival, and, as you say, protecting our people. When we think about Black futures, what do we want? |
This is the question, right? We spend so much time fighting against, and surviving in, what we don’t want—war, prisons, imperialism, homelessness, state-sanctioned violence…the depth and vividness of these ills make it easier to picture this world than another we haven’t known yet. And it is okay that the future we want remains somewhat abstract because we are still dreaming it and making it, but it looks to me something like new ideas of “land ownership” and care for each other and the land; it looks like abolition and something more comprehensive even than “reparations.” To me it looks like starting over from the ground up—changing everything, using love and consciousness as a guide. I’ve found encouragement and inspiration from folks who have spent much time on these subjects, including Patrisse Cullors, Zoé Samudzi, Eve L. Ewing, and our always-from-the-future leader Angela Davis. |
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Young Woman on Money), 2017
Collage on glitter paper, 12 x 12 in.
Image courtesy of the artist
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Baby Dress), 2017
Collage on glitter paper, 12 x 12 in.
Image courtesy of the artist
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Gotta Broken Heart) (Detail), 2016
Collage, 19 x 17 in.
Image courtesy of the artist
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Gotta Broken Heart), 2016
Collage and painted keyboard, 26 x 24 in.
Image courtesy of the artist
Sadie Barnette
Untitled (Dad’s Mug Shot), 2016
Pencil on paper, 30 x 22 in. Installed on a glitter wall at the Oakland Museum of California
Image courtesy of the artist
1. Lyrics for Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” appear on page 412.
2. Jackson, Ashaki M. Surveillance (Los Angeles: Writ Large Press, 2016).
BROWNE, BARNETTE