Sadie Barnette is a multi-media millennial artist engaged in reminding and reinventing. Hailing from Oakland, and armed with a BFA from Cal Arts and an MFA from the University of San Diego, Barnette takes on black themes and subjects with a progressive and highly imaginative perspective. Her father Rodney Barnette founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party, and this history and its literal media and government archive provides a foundation for her to explore personal, familial and political themes through a lens of resistance. 

She uses drawing, photography and large-scale installation to reflect on the dark side of American history while transforming it with materials like glitter, spray paint and crystals. In her first solo museum presentation in Los Angeles, her vibrant installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon will show at ICA LA in downtown. 

From 1990-93, Barnette’s father ran the original Eagle Creek Saloon, the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Giving a safe space for the multiracial LGBTQ community who were marginalized by the racial profiling throughout the city at that time, the bar was an important culture landmark. Barnette reimagines it in neon and gloss decoration using a minimalist and conceptual aesthetic to invoke historical and subconscious experiences. Her version of the saloon celebrates the personalities that must have inhabited it while leaving space to imagine what it may have been like to be there in the community — along the way asking questions about the current state of our culture. 

ICA LA, 1717 E. 7th St., downtown; Sun., Sept. 29- Sun., Jan. 26; free. (213) 928-0833, theicala.org.