My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation

Photographed 2017, printed 2018

In 2016 Sadie Barnette’s family gained access to some five hundred pages of files that the F.B.I. kept on her father, Rodney Barnette, a postal worker and former Black Panther Party member. The chilling set of documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, confirmed their belief that Rodney had been under federal surveillance for decades, his movements and activities recorded in prosaic reports. Struck by this impersonal portrait of her father, Barnette enlarged the files and embellished each one with graphic splotches and bright washes of magenta spray paint. This gesture allows the artist to reclaim the F.B.I.’s reports and transport them into the world of the personal and the familial.