91����

by Hannah Weaver

An overflowing crowd gathered inside and outside the newly opened Benton Museum of Art at 91���� last Saturday afternoon, eager to hear the methodology and meaning behind artist Sadie Barnette’s work. 

Barnette set the tone for future Benton openings by drawing in over 150 people to the museum’s first artist talk for her exhibition “Legacy & Legend.” The two-part exhibition includes one half at the Benton Museum of Art at 91���� and the other at Pitzer College Art Galleries. 

The Benton half features 12 new drawings that expand on Barnette’s previous project, “Dear 1968,…” which features files from a 500-page FBI dossier documenting the organization’s surveillance of her father, Rodney Barnette, due to his involvement with the Black Panther Party.

With this new series, titled “FBI Drawings,” Barnette meticulously recreated the files with powdered graphite into 60-by-48-inch drawings, then covered them with images of flowers as a memorialization, images of Hello Kitty as a nod to the father-daughter relationship and spray paint flourishes as a mark of protest. 

“I wanted to turn this into artwork … somehow I wanted to make these files do something different than they were meant to do. I wanted to make them live in my world and tell my father’s story, my family’s story, which is also so many other families’ stories in this country,” Barnette said.

At Pitzer, the other half of the exhibition is modeled to look like a living room with reworked Barnette family photos hung on the walls. 

Ciara Ennis, Pitzer College Art Galleries director and curator, explained that the installation imagines a future free from the kinds of violence inflicted on Barnette’s family and many others.

“It’s a very intimate space, but at the same time, it’s very inviting… The whole point of the space is to provide some kind of respite from the police brutality, from surveillance, from gentrification,” Ennis said.

Barnette hopes the interactive exhibition will prompt viewers to radically imagine the future.