Would you lay your family’s history out on display, inviting the public to interact with your intimate moments? In Dear 1968, Sadie Barnette exhibits excerpts from her father’s, Rodney Barnette’s, five-hundred page FBI file detailing his involvement with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP), which sought to achieve Black liberation. The FBI closely and illegally watched, harassed, and tried to frame Barnette to prevent the movement from progressing. (Aranke, “Whose 1968? Bringing History Home in Sadie Barnette’s Dear 1968”) However, the gallery is more than a government record exposed; Sadie Barnette cushions the confidential paperwork with family portraits, hung in frames or tessellated into a wallpaper. It is this wallpaper, spanning only one side of the gallery, that caught my eye as I walked in. In …show more content…
Huey Newton’s iconic photograph of the titular timeframe. Unlike any other photo in the show, the child’s face is purposefully obstructed, not with the harsh strikeouts found in the files, but with a pink, felt, and v-shaped decal. This v-shape draws the audience’s gaze to the next square, which is just a rotated form of the previous. The line of direction continues with four total rotations forming a blocked pattern, repeated throughout the surface. Sadie Barnette uses these themes of replication, perspective, and color to regain power over intimacy in her gallery.
The wallpaper is a replication of Dr. Huey Newton’s historic photograph. A co-founder of the Black Panther movement, he too sits poised on a wicker chair. However, unlike the child in Barnette’s piece, he holds a spear and a rifle, with a zebra rug lining his feet and tribal props constituting the background. While Dr. Newton’s image parodies western ideas of blackness, Barnette’s wallpaper “reminds us … that Newton’s image itself looks like a domestic space, the comforts of which make the political, personal and the public, private.”