The FBI Project (2016 — ongoing) employs a variety of material interventions engaging the FBI’s 500-page surveillance file amassed on my father, Rodney Barnette, during his time organizing with the Black Panther Party and helping Angela Davis in her fight for exoneration. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, and after four years of back-and-forth with the FBI, my family obtained this chilling dossier that details the routine surveillance of my father by special agents, harassment and intimidation of family and friends, and the solicitation of informants to infiltrate the Black Power Movement. Combing through page after page of state-sanctioned attempts to discredit, frame, to destroy and undo my father, I thought, “Damn, I’m lucky he is alive. That he lived to tell. That I was born.” My second thought was, “Make this art, make this do something.” Trusting in my rigorous yet playful aesthetic of minimalism, restraint, and color, I started making collages and drawings that appropriated the official documents. I wanted to reclaim them and make them live in my world.
I started in 2016 at document scale. I took the 8.5-by-11-inch FBI pages, which were heavily redacted and punctuated with officious markings and handwritten margin notes, and splashed them with bright pink spray paint and pastel rhinestones. The spray paint points to graffiti and “tagging” (an act of reclamation), to my own lexicon of redactions and the unknowable.
The crystal adornment is an impossible and tiny act of healing. I also figured pink glitter would be a kind of kryptonite to J. Edgar Hoover’s tortured ghost.
In 2020, I started the series “FBI Drawings,” steering the work toward a shift in scale and materiality that holds weight and claims more space, underscoring that this project is one of redress. In these large-scale (5 x 4 ft) drawings, the file pages are tonally inverted, suggesting further transmutation from the original authority and intent, and rendered by hand in a heavy application of powdered graphite on stark white paper. The slowed-down, labor-intensive act of making these pages into drawings affords me time to meditate on the bravery, the politic, the real life people, sisters, fathers. . . this new hand-drawn copy becomes more real than the original. I add flowers (roses specifically) to the bureaucratic documents to honor, to mourn and memorialize, to add life, and to suggest evidence of the domestic and rituals of care. In other works, I collage holographic vinyl into the rectangular voids of redactions to propose a counter-surveillance, a resistance, and a restorative technology.
— Sadie Barnette
The FBI Project (2016 — ongoing) employs a variety of material interventions engaging the FBI’s 500-page surveillance file amassed on my father, Rodney Barnette, during his time organizing with the Black Panther Party and helping Angela Davis in her fight for exoneration. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, and after four years of back-and-forth with the FBI, my family obtained this chilling dossier that details the routine surveillance of my father by special agents, harassment and intimidation of family and friends, and the solicitation of informants to infiltrate the Black Power Movement. Combing through page after page of state-sanctioned attempts to discredit, frame, to destroy and undo my father, I thought, “Damn, I’m lucky he is alive. That he lived to tell. That I was born.” My second thought was, “Make this art, make this do something.” Trusting in my rigorous yet playful aesthetic of minimalism, restraint, and color, I started making collages and drawings that appropriated the official documents. I wanted to reclaim them and make them live in my world.
I started in 2016 at document scale. I took the 8.5-by-11-inch FBI pages, which were heavily redacted and punctuated with officious markings and handwritten margin notes, and splashed them with bright pink spray paint and pastel rhinestones. The spray paint points to graffiti and “tagging” (an act of reclamation), to my own lexicon of redactions and the unknowable. The crystal adornment is an impossible and tiny act of healing. I also figured pink glitter would be a kind of kryptonite to J. Edgar Hoover’s tortured ghost.
In 2020, I started the series “FBI Drawings,” steering the work toward a shift in scale and materiality that holds weight and claims more space, underscoring that this project is one of redress. In these large-scale (5 x 4 ft) drawings, the file pages are tonally inverted, suggesting further transmutation from the original authority and intent, and rendered by hand in a heavy application of powdered graphite on stark white paper. The slowed-down, labor-intensive act of making these pages into drawings affords me time to meditate on the bravery, the politic, the real life people, sisters, fathers. . . this new hand-drawn copy becomes more real than the original. I add flowers (roses specifically) to the bureaucratic documents to honor, to mourn and memorialize, to add life, and to suggest evidence of the domestic and rituals of care. In other works, I collage holographic vinyl into the rectangular voids of redactions to propose a counter-surveillance, a resistance, and a restorative technology.
— Sadie Barnette